It’s a weekday evening in May, and the smell of rain is detectable, forecasting a downpour on its way. As the sky begins to open, New Yorkers scurry for cover — but 6LACK, 33, seems to be in his element. Before consuming his first meal of the day at his favorite restaurant, the rapper and R&B artist opts for a quick stroll through the Lower East Side while the rain is only drizzling. He’s had a long day promoting his upcoming album, Love Is the New Gangsta, and he needs to decompress. 

It’s taken time for this five-time Grammy-nominated artist, who grew up in east Atlanta, to enjoy visiting New York. “Five years ago I didn’t like it because I was always here for work,” he says. “It felt so high-volume. Everybody’s beeping, folks are a little more aggressive, you go from venue to building to interview and traffic is soaking up all of your time. I figured out that I need space when I come here.”

6LACK — whose stage name derives from his childhood neighborhood, Zone Six — loves simplicity and the finer things: spending time with loved ones, stopping by farmer’s markets, and being near any body of water. When we meet for dinner at a downtown izakaya, he takes the lead in ordering. As the table fills with shishito peppers, cucumber salad, spicy tuna crispy rice, hamachi serrano peppers, steak, salmon, and oxtail rice, he contemplates the growth of his palate in all aspects: “Wings were always number one for me, but at this point in my life I think sushi is top, for sure.” 

Outside of food, 6LACK has grown as an artist, father, and partner, coming to understand his need for balance. Space and contemplation are not only themes in his daily life, but the ultimate foundation of Love Is the New Gangsta, releasing May 22. The birth of this album came around a time when he and his partner, artist Bianca Leonor Quiñones (a.k.a. Quiñ), were undergoing a creative process of their own: the approaching birth of their now-10-month-old daughter, Blaze. “Before the pregnancy, our relationship was on the rocks,” he says. He recalls that he had just gone back to Atlanta and begun working with rapper and producer Childish Major at the time. “I just started to vent and have open conversations about what I was going through, and we just knew we had to make an album about it.” 

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It was in these conversations that 6LACK began to have revelations about his mental health. “It was like this ongoing session of therapy, accountability, and being creative,” he says. “Whether talking or jamming to guitar and keys, everything just kind of meshed together, and songs started to spill out. We just started cooking up. It was fun.” 

Growing up as the oldest of three, 6LACK, whose real name is Ricardo Valdez Valentine Jr., was introverted. His first time rapping was at age four to a song called “Blues,” written by his father, who is also a rapper. “My verses didn’t rhyme or nothing crazy. It was just, ‘When I grow up, I want to be somebody. I’m believing God. I believe in me,’” he recalls. “That was my first rap on a beat and a recorded song.” While he credits his father for being the one to introduce him to the art form, he honed his skills in private. “My seriousness, my passion, and curiosity really came from just being in my room to myself.” He credits his knack for R&B to his mother, who often played artists like Monica, Brandy, and 112. 

Those influences became the foundation of his taste growing up in Atlanta in the early 2000s. He describes his fandom in terms of eras, listening to artists like Jadakiss, Dipset, Jeezy, OutKast, and battle rappers Cassidy and Reed Dollaz. “From there, once I had some space to myself, I just started venturing off into whatever I could find,” he says. His current era involves genres like alternative and jazz, riddled throughout his latest project. “I’m all over the place,” he says of his taste. “I’m just curious and a fan. I think the biggest compliment that you can get from someone listening to your music is them having to stop and question, ‘What is this?” 

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When it comes to the music he makes, he describes it as a “diary,” giving listeners lyrical insight into his inner world. Love Is the New Gangsta starts off with the smooth yet lyrically striking “Bounty,” based on a woman scorned and plotting the emotional death of her lover. “All That Matters” — which features Grammy-nominated artist AZ Chike and Grammy winner Leon Thomas — has a bass line that feels like a heart throb, acting as an instrumental metaphor to convey his love for his partner. The melody and tempo for both songs have a texture of his alternative influences, yet both are a testament of his own expression. 

“Sunday Again,” which features 2 Chainz, is one of his favorites. It describes his ideal Sunday doing what he loves: making love and enjoying a hearty meal to recharge afterwards. The lyricism is witty, playing into the calendar theme: “You know you good for catching me on my weak days.” “Wifey Baby Mama” gets to the heart of the matter, directly addressing the cons of his introverted nature, with lyrics like “You loved a poet who can’t get his words right sometimes.” “Out of Body” features Quiñ, his partner and best friend. “That took the most time,” he says. “Just to get the right mix and feel super confident in how our voices were weaving in and out of each other. Just being more considerate overall, because just because I like something doesn’t mean that it’s the best version of what it can be.” 

6LACK first found Quiñ 13 years ago on YouTube, while listening to music at a friend’s house. “A girl I used to kick it with was playing me some stuff she listened to and there was a video of [Quiñ] singing an acoustic song. From that moment, I was locked,” he says. He looked her up on Twitter and eventually mustered up the nerve to tweet at the then-stranger: “I love you, bye.”

From that moment on, they built a slow yet steady rapport. When she released anything, he was an avid supporter. When he was exiting his first record deal, he slid in her DMs to ask for advice, to which she replied “follow what your gut feels.” They exchanged numbers, which led to daily texts and FaceTimes for a year. Then he flew out to L.A. to finally meet his friend in person. “It was a storybook moment,” he says of their first time laying eyes on each other. “You see the person you’ve been talking to for a long time and it’s like, ‘Oh shit. Where have you been?’ It was so familiar. I could feel it in my chest. I could feel it in my stomach. I had butterflies and was nervous. We kicked it that whole week, but it was still platonic.” 

They waited another year to explore the topic of romance, yet decided against it, wanting to protect the integrity of their bond. “We took a little break and that was my first real version of heartbreak,” he recalls. To occupy his time, he locked in on his music, although casually dating around. That is, until he found out his oldest daughter, Syx, was on the way. “Going through that time period was very traumatic,” he says. “I was just becoming an adult, and now I have to figure out how to provide for a kid, for myself and her mother. At the same time, my career was taking off and I’m trying to figure out the living dynamic. It felt so glitchy.” 

On top of that, he had to also break the news to Quiñ. “I had to take that news to my best friend,” he says. “I didn’t tell her for a while and then one day we were just sitting in the car and she [brought it up]. That set the tone for being honest in every conversation, because I had something that I was so ashamed and nervous about and I didn’t know how to say it. And then she said it first.” 

The complexity of learning to love as a father, while also learning to love himself, proved to be most challenging. “That trauma lasted for a very long time, because you miss out on certain things in your kid’s life. You try to make it up later on, and kind of move through life, but in the back of your mind, you realize, ‘I wasn’t happy,’ or ‘I missed a photo or a recital.’” 

Now a father of two, 6LACK lights up talking about Syx, who is nine years old and a sports fanatic. He also seems in a better space about co-parenting, focusing on the bigger picture of it all. “For us, one thing we have in common is just how much we love and respect our kid,” he says. 

In 2018, 6lack and Quiñ got together officially, and they had a baby of their own in 2025. He credits the honesty and vulnerability of their relationship as being the foundation of their family dynamic. “I got a partner that’s sharp. If she sees, hear, or dreams anything that’s not right, she’s like ‘I had a dream you got on my fucking nerves last night. What’s going on?’” 

This level of being seen has forced 6LACK out of his shell, making him a better man and a better artist. “That can be intimidating for you to work yourself up to being an honest person,” he says. “Sometimes you have to strip your ego down for you to truly understand when you need it.” Is that the reason why he fell in love to begin with? “Hell yeah. That’s the reason why I was super drawn to this person in the beginning. From the first conversation, it was like somebody was pulling something new out of me.”

As much as this album is about romantic love, it is also about mental health, confronting trauma, and the importance of male platonic love. On the song “Trauma,” he sings “Trauma, trauma, got it from my mother/Trauma, trauma, got it from my father” before he raps, “Opportunity felt trapped in/Life of a Black man.” During the process of making this album, 6LACK had to restructure some friendships, figuring out what platonic love means for him at this point in time. When it felt like friends were going in a different direction, he pulled them aside for a conversation. 

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“I was like, ‘Moving forward, I would appreciate it if either you don’t put me in this position, or you have my back when I need you to have my back and vice versa,’” he says. “We just really need to be there for each other in a different way. From here on out, those are the types of relationships that I want to have. And I think naturally, you just kind of grow apart from people after you have conversations like that.”

Following the album’s release, 6LACK is looking forward to touring. He’s dreaming of moving to Costa Rica, where he can pick pejibaye, a local fruit, off the peach palm trees. “My love language at this point is quality time. I love being home with my person, beach days and road trips, us packing up the car and traveling to the next city,” he says. “Another love language of mine is support. To perform and play music and see a person celebrating — it’s a form of validation and reassurance. It’s never like, ‘I have to win a Grammy, I gotta make music that gets me in a specific conversation.’ It’s always just, I want to make what feels true to me.”