SALIMATA is making space for herself

Swapping the close-knit community and breakneck pace of New York’s rap scene for the more laid-back rhythm of Marseille focused SALIMATA’s mind and prompted a return to her roots. Now, as momentum builds, the Brooklyn-raised rapper is playing it cool.

On a Zoom call from a New York studio, SALIMATA (real name: Salma Calhoun) is back in her hometown for the first time in a while. The rapper, born and raised on the East Side of the Big Apple, has been doing this long enough to know that the city she hails from never really leaves you, no matter how far you travel. “I feel like I embody New York naturally,” she says. “Anywhere I go in the world, people know I’m from New York, whether it’s from my accent, or I have too much fashion going on for no reason.”

On screen, she’s wearing glasses almost half the size of her face, a stack of chains and necklaces, chunky rings on nearly every finger, and animal-print tights with a tank top that really shouldn’t work together, but she pulls it off – proof, perhaps, that she truly wasn’t lying about the fashion.

SALIMATA moved to Marseille a couple of years ago to be with her partner, and the city has done something to her sound. The Mediterranean port – France’s oldest – is more spread out than New York; you can actually see the horizon. And that space has crept into the music. Her most recent (third) album, The Happening, breathes differently from her earlier work. The flows remain composed and nimble, but where she once felt relentless, now she feels settled, her words landing with unforced ease over minimal, jazzy beats that have room to stretch out and groove. This change of pace has brought her eyes all over the internet.

But ask SALIMATA whether this is her moment – the COLORS performance back in January that went semi-viral, the steady run of artists-to-watch lists, a stretch opening for MIKE across Europe, two buzzy On the Radar freestyles – and she almost shrugs. “Technically, it is a breakout moment, but for me, not yet. My breakout moment will probably be when I can do all that personality shit and get liked for it.” Her manager tells her her numbers. She registers the shock, then deletes the figures from her mind. She believes that if she paid real attention to the reception, the music would change. To understand her mindset, you have to go back.

SALIMATA grew up in Brooklyn with her mother and brother. Her mother, who was raised in Côte d’Ivoire, still sews most of her daughter’s performance outfits by hand – everything from warm, fur-trimmed coats to the tight, midriff-baring grey getup she wore for her COLORS performance. When SALIMATA tests a new song on her mum, she reliably responds with notes about African drums and African culture more broadly: food, music, a whole world the rapper now wants to weave more deliberately into her lyrics.

Growing up, her mum would play a lot of African music – most notably Fela Kuti – as well as Michael Jackson, and even went through a Lil Wayne phase when SALIMATA was around 11. “That was crazy.” Then, at 14, 15, 16, Tumblr cracked the rapper’s world wide open. Girls from the neighbourhood were constantly sharing music on the now much-lamented platform, and they became her radio station of choice. She’d go round to their homes (usually in Brooklyn), plug her phone into their computers, and leave with new MP3 folders. That’s how she found Joey Bada$$, Capital Steez, Flatbush Zombies, Odd Future, Kendrick, ScHoolboy Q.

There were Tumblr meets too, with people from all over gathering and just being themselves – a kind of freedom that felt radical before the algorithm age largely flattened self-expression into numbers and engagement. Among them was Ken Rebel, a Brooklyn rapper known for genre-blending, who built a following on the platform as part of a movement that stitched together indie sleaze and streetwear into something distinctly New York. He lived on her block and became a blueprint for self-expression. Others from that community would also come up, including Danii Phae. “That whole era was different. That was a really expressive time for New York.” Prior to then, expressing yourself in her neighbourhood could mean getting beaten up or shouted at from windows. Those Tumblr meets broke that open. “They influenced me to be myself, not to be like them.” Then, for reasons she keeps to herself, her family sent her to Florida.

Uprooted from her friends, and with Tumblr fading, she found herself young, broke and depressed in her dad’s house in Florida. She opened GarageBand and started making music to channel her feelings. The result was Eat2LiveOREat2Die, a collection of lo-fi, unmixed vignettes – rough around the edges but shot through with the smooth, unhurried flow that would come to define her. It caught the ear of MIKE, a rapper she had come across a few years earlier, when a kid came round to her New York apartment and started blaring music she didn’t recognise. She asked who it was. “This guy named MIKE,” the kid said, barely containing himself. After he left, she kept playing it over and over. Now, the two had a connection of their own: MIKE pushed her to release her debut project, OUCH, putting it out on his label, 10k.

Florida didn’t last long, but it taught her how to read people and code switch. “I’m going to Florida and getting teased for being from New York, and then I come back to New York and I’m getting teased for sounding like I’m from Florida.”

When she got back to New York, she spent around four hours a day on the subway commuting to work, and devoted almost all of it to writing. Confident, assertive lyrics mostly, with flashes of vulnerability, and the words came fast. What started as a practical workaround to a packed schedule swiftly became something else. “It wasn’t really writing, I was just the source and it was coming out.” She was performing the material too, at small venues around the city, finding her footing in front of a crowd.

SALIMATA left New York for Marseille partly to be with her partner, partly to exhale. In her first two years abroad, she didn’t feel homesick so much as relieved. Now, in her third year away from the US, the romanticism has set in, and she returns to New York overly excited. “I feel like I’m on steroids when I’m here,” she says, back in the city – a chance to breathe it in again before heading back across the Atlantic.

Almost 4,000 miles from home, far from the tight-knit scenes of New York, SALIMATA has become less passive about making music. “I’m not waiting to do music. I have to do music.” In New York, it always started with a beat, words following the music. In Marseille, with fewer beats readily available, she sometimes writes without one – and in doing so has found herself reaching back into her roots. Coming from a West African family, she grew up with French around her at home and would even throw it into her earliest freestyles. She now wants to bring that back into her verses, but living in France, it has to be elite. “Otherwise it’s corny.”

The Happening, released in December 2025 and recorded primarily in Marseille, captures exactly this in-between state. “I’m capturing right now, where I am in my career.” The production is lush, inflected with jazz and funk – think Pink Siifu or Navy Blue – with collaborators including Queens singer-songwriter Kelly Moonstone and Grammy-nominated Texas artist Peyton. The album opened doors, including a collaboration with Jenevieve and Freddie Gibbs, two co-signs that suggest the world is starting to catch up with where SALIMATA already was.

In February came Supastar Livin, released for her birthday and accompanied by a video shot at a Thai resort. Where another rapper might have filled the frame with designer labels, SALIMATA kept it relaxed and understated, comfortable rather than ostentatious. “No Louis V sprawled everywhere,” just the suggestion that things were going well. “I just wanted people to see that I’m calm, cool, collected, no funny shit. Things is Gucci, n****s eating good. That don’t mean we rich or nothing, but things is good right now.” A pause. “It’s like fake flexing. And I was a little tight on there because my pops was asking me for bread.”

As SALIMATA’s profile rises, however, she’s been feeling more and more like an outsider. She has no posse, no entourage; she’s been doing this alone since her first freestyle. And maybe because of that, she becomes someone else on stage entirely – more intense, locked inward, as though the performance is a kind of armour. “The person you’re talking to now is not the person you see on stage. As soon as the show is done and people ask me how it was, I cannot answer them. I literally do not know because I am not that person any more.”

Performing in Europe has been enlightening. “They’re so happy, and it’s just so cute,” she says of audiences that lack New York’s too-cool energy. Even after opening for MIKE on his recent European tour, she would slip into the crowd and watch people mouth every word back at him. “It’s like, wow.”

It’s a telling image: the rising star, anonymous in the crowd, still a fan at heart. Because for all her ambitions – headline shows, a producer with real creative chemistry, a sound that keeps shifting and takes people with it – SALIMATA wants to do this on her own terms. She’d “love for Vogue to ask me, ‘Hey, how do you get ready before your shows?’” She wants to break into modelling. But she also wants to shout out her little brother, and everyone who has supported her behind closed doors.

“I’m a pretty lonely dude, so not a long list.”