Gabriel Jacoby Forges a Bold New Sound Blending Tampa’s Krunk and Southern Roots

The Florida-born artist is transforming Tampa’s krank, backwoods blues, and head-nodding R&B into a distinct linguistic identity. With support from Justin Bieber and Kaytranada, an upcoming appearance at Camp Flog Gnaw, and a new project on the horizon, Jacoby shows no signs of abandoning his roots.

By Oumar Saleh | September 7, 2026

The irony is that Jacoby’s future remains inseparable from his past. Born in rural Anderson, South Carolina, he moved with his family, including six other siblings, to Tampa when he was nine. Before relocating to Florida, his household had no internet or cable television, yet he resists framing those formative years solely through the lens of hardship. “How do you know you’re going through something unless people tell you?” he asks rhetorically. “To me, that was just regular. It wasn’t until I got to Florida that I got exposed to what adversity at certain times is supposed to feel like.”

To him, being a “Dirty South baby” means recognizing the beauty alongside the ugliness. “To some degree, it’s a dirty, muddy, rainy, muggy way of life,” he explains. “But a lot of the most beautiful things in the world came from the South.” That pride courses through ‘Gutta Child’, a project that rarely allows difficult circumstances to dictate its mood. You can almost hear Jacoby grinning on the title track, a head-nodder that struts along a rubbery bassline and pays homage to his two homes: “Carolina water, mix it with that Florida.” “The culture of Carolina is its own thing. The culture of Florida is its own thing, and I have appreciation for both,” he says. “And I do genuinely feel like both made me who I am.”

Underneath the irresistible jumble of springy drums and livewire guitar of ‘Bootleg’ sits krank, the fast, percussive hyperlocal dance music Jacoby grew up surrounded by—a genre he has increasingly woven into his own R&B. “If Tampa was a village, krank is the native dance,” he explains. “As time went by and technology advanced, it kinda got swept under the rug.” But rather than dusting it off for nostalgia’s sake, Jacoby wants to experiment with it. “I don’t really see myself as one genre, but I feel like it’s cool to bring it into my own way.”

It is the EP’s laid-back closer, ‘Be Careful’, though, that contains the most succinct description of Jacoby’s artistry. “I can lean back in this blues truck / Easy way to find my way around this tune up,” he croons in his tender falsetto as the tempo drops, conjuring an image of a young musician cruising forward inside something battered, distinctly Southern, and considerably older than himself. It is little wonder that Jacoby has mentioned in past interviews that it is the song he wants people to listen to first.

“I want you to be able to experience something new”

Jacoby is equally devoted to visual storytelling. He sees music before he hears it, citing Akira Kurosawa, Tim Burton, and Christopher Nolan as readily as any musical inspiration—Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams gave him the idea to use a spoken Japanese intro for his 2023 kaleidoscopic single of the same name, Burton’s gothic oddities feed his weirder impulses, and Nolan inspires the scale and grandeur. “Most of the stuff I create is inspired by either a dream I’ve had or just something visual. I’m the composer, and I’m choosing to put a movie, a short film, behind this.”

Even the boxing imagery scattered across his oeuvre stems from memory rather than a mood board. Growing up, Jacoby and his brothers could not afford a punching bag, so an oak tree took the beating instead. “If I’m not sparring with my brother or cousins or something, all I had was an oak tree, so I felt like I had to bring that in, had to show people that.” Floridians clocked it instantly, transforming limitations into myth without anybody sanding off the splinters.

There were harder times as well. Before committing fully to music, Jacoby spent time incarcerated, writing lyrics on paper and imagining beats he had no way to build. “It was never the same as when I could actually play piano or play guitar. It really just taught me to appreciate freedom and not take it for granted,” he says, before circling back to the one thing that never changed. “I could never see myself doing anything else. I came out the womb only thinking about music and only being about music.”

Money took longer to catch up with the talent. In the summer of 2024, he was scrubbing plates one day and discussing his future with label executives the next. By August, he had signed to Pulse Records and relocated to Los Angeles, placing him within arm’s reach of myriad producers and studios. “I’ve always been alone in the sense of, like, I can do everything myself,” Jacoby says. “But I’ve come to appreciate other creatives. I really appreciate producers because that’s the superpower.”

Still, you can take the boy out of Florida, but not the other way around. When the songs stopped arriving naturally, he flew straight from a show in London to Miami to work with production team The Monsters & Strangerz. Jacoby simply needed the rain, humidity, and palm trees again. “I have been creating in LA at least since ‘Gutta Child’ came out, and it hasn’t really worked as much,” he admits. “I’m big on inspiration, and nature is my biggest inspiration.”

New famous friends haven’t changed that equation much. Justin Bieber discovered Jacoby’s music online and invited him over, but what Jacoby remembers is not a brush with fame, but mutual recognition between two musicians. “He actually truly is like a musician,” he says, recalling Bieber behind a drum kit and a guitar. “He’s doing the same stuff I’ve done, except we’ve just come from two completely different sides of life.” His sessions with Kaytranada are even more intriguing, given the dancefloor pulse already running under Jacoby’s neo-soul. They prioritised finding a song together, he says. “Let’s make a Kaytranada-Gabriel song, and it will be something entirely new.” There is material sitting on a hard drive somewhere, but he is in no rush to touch it.

“I came out the womb only thinking about music and only being about music”

His own next chapter arrives first in the form of a new upcoming project. Where ‘Gutta Child’ was something Southern listeners could hold up and say, “look, this is who we are,” the follow-up goes much deeper. “I’m gonna make something even more undeniable, to where you just can’t look away,” he says. The songs will confront his own pain alongside the struggles of women, children, and a world reshaped by war. “It’s not gonna be metaphorical anymore.”

The local keeps traveling, too. At London’s Jazz Cafe Festival in August, he watched crowds thousands of miles from Tampa move to ‘Bootleg’ as if they had grown up on krank. As one of the first in his immediate family to leave the country, that landed heavier than just a stamp in his passport. Next up: playing Austin City Limits and sharing the Camp Flog Gnaw bill with Future, Steve Lacy, Isaiah Rashad, and Tyler, The Creator—another leap for a kid who, just two summers back, was still a dishwasher hunched over a sink.

Ask Jacoby where all of this is supposed to lead, and he reaches without hesitation for Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, and Prince—not for the stadiums or the numbers, but because he hears the same message running through all three discographies. “I am going to push nothing but love,” he says. “I’m never going to compromise my message.” Even if you take away the acclaim, co-signs, and momentum, his answer remains the same: “I’m never gonna stop creating. Even if I was dead broke, living on the street, I always, always made music.”

Gabriel Jacoby has new music coming soon. He will perform at Austin City Limits and Camp Flog Gnaw 2026

Listen to Gabriel Jacoby’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Oumar Saleh
Photography: Karis Beaumont
Styling: Al Rogers, James Loach
Makeup: Patricia Hytonen
Location: Arch Studios
Label: Pulse

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