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A$AP Ferg Reacts To New NYC Rappers (Lil Tecca, Pop Smoke, Lil TJay)

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Genius put a Harlem legend in a room with three of New York’s hottest new sounds and hit record.

On July 18, 2019, Genius dropped a new installment of its interview series The Cosign, and this time the artist on the couch was A$AP Ferg. Instead of talking about his own catalog, the Harlem rapper and A$AP Mob member spent the episode reacting in real time to three of the biggest breakout records coming out of New York City that summer. The result is a veteran’s unfiltered read on the city’s next generation.

• The episode, titled “A$AP Ferg Reacts To New NYC Rappers (Lil Tecca, Pop Smoke, Lil TJay) | The Cosign,” was released by Genius on July 18, 2019.
• Ferg listens to and breaks down three specific viral tracks: Lil Tecca’s “Ransom,” Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party,” and Lil TJay’s “Ruthless.”
• Each artist represents a different corner of the city — Tecca out of Queens, Pop Smoke repping Brooklyn drill, and Lil TJay coming from the South Bronx.

Three Boroughs, Three Different Sounds

What makes the episode work is that Ferg isn’t just reacting to one style of rap — he’s reacting to three distinct lanes that all happened to blow up out of New York in the same stretch of 2019. Lil Tecca’s “Ransom” is bouncy, melodic, and built for TikTok virality. Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party” is Brooklyn drill at its rawest, a record that became the sound of that summer in the five boroughs. Lil TJay’s “Ruthless” splits the difference, pairing a South Bronx voice with the kind of hook-driven songwriting that crosses over to streaming playlists. Ferg, a member of A$AP Mob, has spent his career watching NYC rap cycle through eras, and that perspective is exactly what The Cosign format is built to capture.

A Veteran’s Read On The New Wave

Throughout the segment, Ferg breaks each track down piece by piece — flow, delivery, production choices, and what each artist is doing differently from the rappers who came before them. The framing of the episode treats Tecca, Pop Smoke, and Lil TJay as three separate case studies in how NYC hip-hop is being rebuilt from the ground up, rather than three interchangeable names in a single “new rapper” bucket.

Three different boroughs, three different breakout records, one Harlem veteran breaking down all of it track by track.

That track-by-track structure is what separates The Cosign from a typical interview segment — Ferg isn’t asked to summarize his opinion of “new rap,” he’s put directly in front of “Ransom,” “Welcome to the Party,” and “Ruthless” and asked to respond to each one on its own terms.

Genius Selected This Specific Trio

The three artists Genius selected weren’t random picks. By July 2019, “Ransom” had already made Lil Tecca one of the year’s fastest-rising teenage breakout stars, “Welcome to the Party” had established Pop Smoke as the face of Brooklyn drill’s mainstream surge, and “Ruthless” had put Lil TJay on the map as a South Bronx melodic rapper with crossover appeal. Putting all three in front of Ferg in a single sitting turns the episode into a snapshot of exactly where NYC rap stood that summer, filtered through someone who’s been part of the city’s rap infrastructure since his own breakout run with A$AP Mob.

The Cosign format has become one of Genius’ go-to ways of getting established artists to weigh in on who’s next, and this particular episode landed at a moment when all three rappers featured — Tecca, Pop Smoke, and Lil TJay — were still riding the initial wave of their breakout singles rather than looking back on established careers, which is exactly the snapshot Genius set out to capture.