xaviersobased Won’t Slow Down, and Struggle Gang Proves It

Seven months after his debut album, xaviersobased returns with a one minute blast of glitched out club rap that barely stops to breathe.

xaviersobased rel “Struggle Gang” on August 25, 2026, a single that clocks in at barely over a minute and does not waste any of it. The 22 year old rapper’s track arrived as a standalone drop through 1-chance, Surf Gang and Atlantic Records rather than as part of a larger project, and it came backed by a companion music video. A release announcement posted to X on the day of the drop pulled in more than 448,000 views within hours, an early sign that his following was paying attention even to a track this short.

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The song leans into the same warped, high speed production that has defined xaviersobased’s catalog since he started uploading music as a teenager in 2016: chopped vocal stutters, drums that sound like they are skipping, and a beat that threatens to fall apart before snap back into rhythm. HotNewHipHop was among the first outlets to cover the rel, describe it as a glitched out club track built on catchy, unpredictable production and noting the rapper’s ease flowing over that kind of chaos. At under 90 seconds, “Struggle Gang” plays less like a fully realized song and more like a jolt, the kind of cut built to spike a set rather than sit on repeat. A few days after rel, the song had pulled roughly 2,700 play on Audiomack alone, a modest number that fits how quickly xaviersobased tends to move on to the next rel rather than linger on the last one. His own catalog runs to dozens of self-rel mixtapes and singles going back near a decade, most of them dropped indie before he ever sign to a major.

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The single lands seven months after Xavier, his 20 track debut studio album rel January 30, 2026, which pulled in convincers as varied as Skrillex, OsamaSon, Zaytoven, and Dylan Brady. Born Xavier Lopez on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, xaviersobased is credited alongside his collective 1c34, a group that started as a Tony Hawk’s Underground gaming clan before turning into a music collective, with helping pioneer the jerk microgenre earlier this decade. Signing to Atlantic Records in 2025 did little to slow his release pace: the label deal produced the Once More EP that August as his major label debut, followed by the Riverside Tour that closed out the year, a European and North American run called Riverside 2.0 this spring, and singles like “Walk to Me” in December and “iPhone 16” in January that led directly into Xavier. That momentum carried into live appearances too. In October 2025, he joined Che on stage during Yeat’s ComplexCon set in Las Vegas to perform their track “Mannequin,” and later recorded the song “Motto” alongside Che and PlaqueBoyMax.

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The Fader named him one of the 32 coolest artists of 2026 in June, and NME’s review of Xavier praised his production as playful and genre-diffuse, qualities that hold just as true across one minute as they do across a full album. “Struggle Gang” does not try to prove anything new. It just keeps the pace.