The first time I met SALIMATA, it was unusually warm for the first week of May. On that summery Sunday, we danced Henny-drunk at Fort Tilden with a group of friends who had managed to spark a bonfire in the sand. It was 2021, which meant clubs were still closed, and that an intimate gathering like this felt miraculous. Five years later, the rapper is now based in Marseille, where she spends much of her time on prettier beaches than we could have fathomed in our early years in New York. She wakes up in the morning to her producer boyfriend making music, then she gets ready and works on her own. The couple travel to the beach, where they do calisthenics before rinsing off in the Mediterranean sea. “The speed is slower, it’s more like you can actually see where you came from,” she tells me as she lights a joint in her sun-filled room. She considers her past life in East New York. “If you’re in your crib and you look out your window and it's just a brick wall, how far can your thoughts really go?”

It’s a simple and poignant statement that in fact exhibits how far the thoughts of the artist, real name Salma Calhoun, took her as a young upstart. As a member of MIKE’s 10K label, she contributes a sophisticated air to the bastion of NYC underground rap. Across a handful of records, the rapper moves among crackly late ’80s soul samples, channeling the imaginative wit and humor of MF DOOM and Outkast. Her luxurious melodies and whip-smart lines are a relief in a musical landscape that rewards fried electronics and smoothed over lyrics. While she raps about money tags, rocky romances, and throwing ass in the club, these chaotic scenes more often draw from the people and stories she soaks in around her more than her own diary. “I used to write lots of stories to make lots of random screenplays. It's really easy and fun to just pretend to be someone else. It’s almost like being an actor in that way, that’s the thing that's awesome about writing, you can go somewhere.” Each line bursts with her open-hearted personality, nestled comfortably in sepia-toned jazz samples that sound like home. “I’m a jazzy nigga,” she confirms. “I love jam sessions, I love live music.”

Despite having the bars to back up her craft, Calhoun never intended on being a rapper. You could say she is a writer by nature, rapper by trade. As a child on a road trip to Florida in 2007, the artist, real name Salma Calhoun, wrote her first words in a journal. Her notebooks would soon be filled with poetry, prompting teachers to invite her to perform at open mics. From the start, her writing was so exuberant that she was consistently asked to read last as a way to elevate the mood at these readings. “Low-key, people do poetry to be depressed, and I get that, but that's not the only place to do that, and it don’t gotta be every motherfucker in here,” she said. “I was like, oh, that's kind of cool, I’ll get to bring up the room.”

As a listener, she also encountered rap late in life. She grew up listening to her Ivorian mother’s records, with house and African music blasting through their Brooklyn home on cleaning days. As she got older, she slowly developed her own sonic repertoire, scrolling through the discographies of The Internet, Erykah Badu, and Corinne Bailey Rae. She first got hooked on rap during the hiphop renaissance of the ’10s, when Pro Era had staked its claim on the New York music scene. By 2016, she was dropping videos where she performed her own bars on Facebook. For years, she put out tracks on Soundcloud, performed at house shows, backyards, and galleries in the Lower East Side. Then in 2022, she finally released her first EP, Ouch. It has all the hallmarks of a great debut: it’s unique and enjoyable, but also scrappy enough that as a listener, you’re intrigued by her potential.

But Calhoun truly comes into her own on her 2025 album released through 10K label, The Happening. Her rhymes cruise over funk samples like Tommy McGee’s 1981 “Now That I Have You,” its gliding melody and peacocking horns backdropping the snappy lyrics of “Sweet Thang.” On “Why U Gotta Act Like???”, she opens by dissing a love interest, before transitioning the lyrics subtly into a love song, and then ultimately closing the song hollering, “Actually, fuck this, fuck you / Get the fuck out my house!” Calhoun, who throughout our conversation proudly refers to herself as “extreme,” describes the album as her personality “soft launch.” As we speak, she laughs often, punctuating most of her winding sentences with jokes. It’s a sense of humor written all over The Happening.

During a recent trip to Los Angeles, she mentions that spent much of her time in studio sessions, which means a follow-up will be available to us soon. When I ask Calhoun what she imagines her dream life as a rapper to look like, I’m taken by the way she measures success by her ability to help others. “My dream life, Jesus.” She takes another hit of her joint and thinks for a while. “Thinking like, 10 to 15 years, it would probably align with having the resources to spread health and small ecosystems of creativity all over everywhere, and have the opportunity to provide back to the youth.”