“I want to be an artist you cannot categorize. You can’t put a box around me. You can’t put anything around me.” Angel Haze was only 21 when they said those words in an interview with The New York Times, but you hardly can attribute this statement to the lightheartedness of youth. Because the rapper – who recently came out as agender and pansexual and has publicly stated a preference for they/them pronouns – clearly defies categorization, and not only in regard to their gender identity (or lack thereof). “I spent a lot of time, in my earlier years of limelight, suppressing myself,” the rapper recently told Buzzfeed when addressing their non-binary gender identity. “I’ve just been sitting here accepting it, you know? What have I been doing all these years?” 

What they have been doing is making a name for themselves and their opinions heard – but let’s start at the beginning. If it weren’t so shockingly real, Angel Haze’s story would make for an impossibly cheesy TV movie – and a bona fide tearjerker at that. Picture this: The now 23-year-old of African-American and Cherokee descent is born Raee’n Roes Wilson in Detroit, Michigan, to a single mother whose husband was killed in a gunfight during the pregnancy and who a few years later, in search of stability and security, falls into the hands of a religious “cult” (Haze’s own word); a branch of the Pentecostal Greater Apostolic Faith that revolves around a “chosen” (and oh-so-stereotypical) religious leader and in which most kinds of contact with the outside world are strictly forbidden.

As if growing up in said preacher’s house (who apparently instilled false hopes in Haze’s mother, one day taking her as his wife) wasn’t traumatic enough, it is a well documented fact today that Raee’n was repeatedly raped as a child, starting at the age of 7, by two close male friends of the family. Although Haze never publicly disclosed the men’s names, the rapper recounts the gut-wrenching story of coping with long-term abuse and the ensuing feelings of helplessness and (self-)hatred in graphic detail in their 2012 rework of fellow-Detroiter Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My Closet”. The in all aspects remarkable track, issued from the mixtape Classick and hailed by The Atlantic as a forceful weapon in the ongoing battle against rape culture, served as Haze’s breakout song, putting the emerging young artist on the map stateside as well as overseas.

“Cleaning Out My Closet” and its heartbreaking backstory are just one example of how the overarching theme of Angel Haze’s life seems to be defiance, and a possible on-screen adaptation would revolve around overcoming demons, coming out on top better and stronger. In short: not giving up. Sounds cheesy, right? Nevertheless, what Angel Haze made of it is evidently everything but (see: their at times almost violent rhyme-spitting).

After eventually leaving the religious cult, the highly dysfunctional family (a term that barely approaches the toxic environment Haze grew up in) moved around the U.S. before settling in New York, where Haze graduated high school through a self-taught online course at age 18. After years of self-loathing, death wishes and eating disorders, they clearly have – at a young age – been through more than most people experience in a lifetime. A lot more downs than ups, depressingly, dangerously dark lows, and yet the rapper is still here today. “I wanted to kill myself,” Haze told the Telegraph in 2013. “I felt violated, you know?”

It’s hard to imagine what Angel Haze had to deal with from early childhood on, but the Detroit native’s story doesn’t end with the public soul-baring – it is still only beginning. “It’s about control for me,” The Telegraph’s Nisha Lilia Diu further quotes the rapper in her portrait, noting that “Haze brings up ‘control’ a lot.” Understandably so: Young Raee’n painfully had to regain control of their life (which, by the way, their mother is no longer a big part of today) and to this day has a hard time letting go of it. 

Case in point, their musical career: Defying the restrictive business rules of the music industry, in late 2013, Haze leaked their own album Dirty Gold online, thus forcing Republic Records to rush-release the rapper’s oft-rescheduled major debut in the last week of that same year. It was a bold (and stubborn) move on Haze’s side resulting, not surprisingly, in disappointing sales. Following critical praise aplenty and promising engagements in the world of high fashion (Haze has performed and modeled for Donatella Versace, Carine Roitfeld, Karl Lagerfeld and Riccardo Tisci, among others), the album leak was deemed career suicide by many. And yet, Haze is once more defying the odds, having evidently made good use of the personal and artistic freedom that came with rejecting industry standards to evolve into a mature, self-aware person over the course of the last few years, instead of dwelling on the past.

Never mind that artistically, Dirty Gold didn’t exactly live up to the expectations. The album, mainly produced in collaboration with indie-rock/pop producers Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Mumford & Sons) and Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Kelly Clarkson, Sia), suffered from wanting too much, too soon, and thus ended up sounding over-ambitious and half-baked. Angel Haze tried on the glamorous role of the famous major artist for size, it didn’t fit them, they moved on. And came out on top stronger and more in control yet again. 

“I just rose from my ashes again / Defeat all my obstacles, ’feat all my obstacles / There is nothin’ that can’t hold me down / This shit is impossible,” Haze raps on their new single, “Impossible”. Less than two years after the failed initial spark that was supposed to ignite a promising mainstream career that never came to be, the rapper is finally on the verge of releasing a brand new body of work, months after scratching the previously announced In the Winter of Wet Years – an EP that was set to include “Candlxs”, a touching and intimate love song Haze wrote for Ireland Baldwin, about whom the rapper outrageously said in a 2014 interview with The Independent: “The media are like, ‘Oh they’re so cute, they’re best friends.’ An interracial gay couple, I mean that’s just weird for America right now. We fuck and friends don’t fuck.” The “weird” (read: controversial) couple has since broken up, and Haze has moved on to the next record, entitled Back to the Woods. The seemingly dark title may or may not allude to a number of things: the woods of semi-celebrity and breadless artistry, for instance; or the woods of dealing with your (post-break-up?) demons, overcoming them, and going back to what you do best.

As “Impossible” and another new song called “Babe Ruthless”, along with the charming self-painted artworks surrounding the new record (not to mention its dark and moody cover photo), already suggested beforehand, Back to the Woods – fully paid out of pocket by Haze themselves with no label backing – is taking us back to the raw, hungry core of Angel Haze – the one who claimed to “run New York” only three years ago. No more sitting in silence, letting people take advantage – the rapper got their voice back and we're finally getting to hear it unfiltered again on Back to the Woods, which dropped September 14th. Call it an album, a mixtape or whatever, but please do call it a comeback. Because Angel Haze bounced back once more and is – so it seems – more ready than ever to fuck shit up. In double- and triple-time, no less.

Photos: Universal Music