Metro Boomin
photo: hotspotatl · cc by 4.0 ↗Leland Tyler Wayne began making beats on a laptop in seventh grade in St. Louis, obsessively studying FL Studio before moving to Atlanta as a teenager and embedding himself in the city's trap scene. Through a run of productions for Future, 21 Savage, Migos, Drake and Post Malone in the mid-2010s, he became one of the era's defining hitmakers, prized for cinematic, melody-forward beats and the whispered 'Metro Boomin want some more' producer tag. His solo albums 'Not All Heroes Wear Capes' (2018) and 'Heroes & Villains' (2022) reframed the producer as a headlining author of the modern trap sound.
Metro Boomin came up in the Atlanta trap ecosystem Zaytoven helped build and has named him among the producers who shaped his path; Zaytoven's signature is a bright, church-trained piano-and-organ melody riding hard 808s and skittering hi-hats, and that melodic approach to trap — where a single hummable keyboard figure carries the whole beat — runs straight through Metro's productions.
listen forThrow on Gucci Mane's 'Icy' and sit with that nimble, major-key keyboard line skipping over the drums, then cue Migos' 'Bad and Boujee' and hear Metro build the record around the same idea: a small, catchy melodic loop that hooks you before anyone raps.
Metro has pointed to the first-wave trap producers — Shawty Redd among them — whose ominous, cinematic beats defined the Young Jeezy era; Shawty Redd built tracks like film scores, all minor-key dread and cavernous 808s, and Metro's darker, widescreen productions carry that same movie-trailer menace.
listen forPlay Young Jeezy's 'Soul Survivor' for that stately, doom-laden chord bed under the hook, then put on Metro's 'Creepin'' — the same sense of a beat scored like a nighttime crime film, the melody looming rather than bouncing.
The dark, horror-movie strain of Southern rap that Three 6 Mafia pioneered in Memphis — eerie minor melodies, chant-like hooks and a menacing low end — is a foundational ancestor of Atlanta trap, and you hear its DNA in Metro's most sinister, stripped-back beats.
listen forCue Three 6 Mafia's 'Who Run It' and feel that stripped, ominous chant-and-808 pressure, then drop 21 Savage's 'Bank Account' — Metro pares the beat down to the same skeletal, creeping menace, a two-finger melody and a hook you mutter more than sing.