Nowadays

"Nowadays" by Lil Skies Featuring Landon Cube: Breakout Hit and Chart History

"Nowadays" arrived as a defining moment in the career of Pennsylvania rapper Lil Skies, born Kristopher Lyman Hudson in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Released in 2017 and featuring fellow emerging artist Landon Cube on the hook, the track became an organic streaming phenomenon that established Lil Skies as one of the most commercially viable voices in the emo-rap and melodic hip-hop wave that was reshaping mainstream music during the late 2010s. The song's trajectory from SoundCloud upload to major commercial success exemplified how streaming platforms had permanently altered the route from regional buzz to national recognition.

The production on "Nowadays" was handled by Tido Vegas, whose hazy, guitar-adjacent trap instrumentation provided the perfect bed for Lil Skies' melodic rapping style. The beat combined elements of lo-fi aesthetics with polished contemporary trap, a combination that resonated strongly with younger listeners who had grown up on bedroom-produced SoundCloud music but also consumed major-label rap. This sonic positioning placed the track in a productive middle ground, simultaneously underground-coded and accessible enough for mainstream streaming playlists.

The song first gained traction on SoundCloud before being picked up more formally after Lil Skies signed with Atlantic Records. Its performance on the Billboard Hot 100 reflected the streaming-era reality of chart measurement: the track appeared on the Hot 100 and spent multiple weeks on the chart, a strong showing for a relatively new artist whose career had been built primarily through digital word-of-mouth rather than traditional radio promotion. On the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, "Nowadays" performed particularly strongly, reflecting the genre context in which it found its primary audience.

Lil Skies released the track as part of a run of singles that would feed into his debut project Life of a Dark Rose, issued through Atlantic Records in January 2018. That project also contained "Red Roses," another collaborative track with Landon Cube that would follow "Nowadays" as a second significant charting single for the pair. The chemistry between Lil Skies' verse delivery and Landon Cube's melodic, emotionally direct hook writing proved to be a formula that resonated with the emo-rap audience seeking music that could articulate feelings of ambivalence, romantic confusion, and youthful uncertainty.

Landon Cube, also from Pennsylvania, contributed the song's chorus, which carried the emotional weight of the track. Cube's voice, which leaned into an indie pop sensibility, created a tonal contrast with Lil Skies' rap verses that gave the song a dynamic texture. This kind of rapper-singer pairing had been a structural feature of the genre since the mid-2010s rise of artists like Post Malone and the late XXXTentacion, and "Nowadays" deployed it with particular effectiveness.

The music video for "Nowadays," which depicted Lil Skies in aesthetically dark, moody visual settings consistent with the song's emotional palette, accumulated tens of millions of views on YouTube and served as the primary visual introduction to his artistic persona for a large audience. The video reinforced the tattoo-covered, emotionally candid image that would become central to his public identity across his early career.

The track was certified platinum by the RIAA, a milestone that confirmed the scale of its streaming-driven commercial success. Its performance demonstrated that artists could achieve significant chart and certification results without following the traditional radio-first promotional pathway, a validation of the SoundCloud-to-streaming pipeline that had been developing since the early 2010s. Atlantic Records' involvement ensured the track received distribution support and playlist positioning that amplified what had already been an organically growing record.

Critically, "Nowadays" was positioned as a representative artifact of the broader emo-rap movement that was dominating youth culture during 2017 and 2018. Publications covering hip-hop noted the track's emotional directness, its willingness to foreground vulnerability alongside the conventional signifiers of rap success, and its production aesthetic as markers of a generational shift in how young rap artists were defining their public personas. The song's legacy includes its role in establishing Lil Skies as a figure capable of carrying emotional weight while maintaining commercial accessibility, a balance that would define his subsequent career trajectory through multiple album releases on Atlantic in the years that followed.

The success of "Nowadays" also validated the continued commercial relevance of Landon Cube as a collaborative partner and featured artist. The chemistry between the two Pennsylvania artists proved replicable, with their subsequent collaboration "Red Roses" charting and further cementing the duo's status as a productive creative unit in the emo-rap space. Both artists benefited from the streaming-era reality that successful collaborations generate cross-audience discovery: fans who came to "Nowadays" through Lil Skies discovered Landon Cube, and vice versa, creating a mutually reinforcing audience expansion that neither would have achieved as efficiently working independently. The track's commercial performance, its critical reception, and its role as a gateway into a significant 2018 album cycle made it one of the more consequential breakthrough records of its release year, a song that opened doors that both artists continued to walk through in the seasons that followed.