It’s been a while since Christian hip-hop had someone who sounded like Marty. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s been a while since someone in Christian hip-hop decided not to sound like Christian hip-hop at all.
That’s not a diss. It’s just a fact.
While the genre has become increasingly polished, worship-adjacent and algorithm-friendly in recent years, Marty’s new solo album The One arrives like a blunt-force reminder of everything that made old-school rap fun: personality, storytelling, wordplay, sample flips and actual bars. It’s a love letter to the golden-era hip-hop he grew up on, back when lyrics still mattered and rappers were allowed to be weird.
“I don’t really want Christian hip-hop fans,” Marty says. “I want people who love hip-hop and still love God. I want fans who also listen to Nas or Jay-Z but then listen to my record. That’s who I am. I’m trying to reach who I am.”
Before going solo, Marty spent more than a decade as one-half of Social Club Misfits, the cult-favorite duo known for their quirky charisma and genre-blurring catalog. Signed to EMI CMG for several years, the group seemed poised to break into the mainstream market, especially after scoring multiple Dove Award nominations and high-profile playlist spots. But behind the scenes, the label machine didn’t quite click.
“You end up curating a sound to make everyone happy,” Marty says. “You want the label happy, Christian radio happy, fans happy. And you think that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Eventually, he realized that if he wanted to grow, he’d have to go indie. He launched Apollo Records, started producing his own tracks and signed a few handpicked artists to develop alongside him.
“Now I’m fully me,” he says. “I know who I am. I know who I’m not. And I’m good with both.”
That independence shows. The One feels looser, sharper, more confident than anything he’s made before. Marty handled nearly every part of the process himself—writing, producing, mixing—and the result is an album that doesn’t just sound different from what’s out there; it feels different, too.
It’s playful and nostalgic but never corny. There are bars about leftover ziti, microwave instructions from his mom and youth group skits gone wrong. There are samples and soul loops and head-nodding beats that sound like they were built for boomboxes, not TikTok.
It would be easy to label The One a throwback project. But that would miss the point. Marty’s not trying to recreate the past. He’s trying to reclaim the parts of it that made him fall in love with hip-hop in the first place.
“I remember hearing Kid Cudi for the first time and being like, whoa, this sounds incredible,” he says. “And every song on this album is a reference point like that for me—something that made me stop and go, ‘I love this.’”
He’s also in no rush to make it all make sense. One track is titled “Tupac Is Still Alive in Cuba,” with no explanation. Others veer between humorous and heartfelt in the same breath. He’ll rap about purity culture in one bar and then joke about thinking someone was breakdancing when they caught the Holy Spirit the next. It’s all part of the package: honest, unfiltered faith from someone who’s still laughing at the weirdness of it all.
That might be what makes The One so refreshing. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t pander. It just exists as a full expression of who Marty is—an Italian Puerto Rican kid who didn’t grow up in church, found God anyway, and is still making sense of it all with a mic in one hand and a punchline in the other.
But the title The One isn’t just a nod to standing out. It’s rooted in Scripture—specifically, the story in Matthew 18 of the shepherd leaving the 99 sheep to go after the one that wandered.
“That story means a lot to me because I feel like I’m the one,” Marty says. “I didn’t grow up in church. I wasn’t running from God. I was doing fine. Life was good. But when I finally experienced His presence, it cut through everything. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t desperate. But I knew I needed something more.”
He remembers being invited to youth group and showing up mostly to hang out. But something happened.
“I was in the back row, not paying attention, looking around, and suddenly I started crying,” he says. “I had no idea why. That was the presence of God meeting me where I was. That moment changed my life. That’s why this album is called The One. It’s about how far God will go to meet someone who isn’t even looking for Him.”
“God embraced me for my personality,” he adds. “I didn’t have to act like everybody else. I didn’t have to change to be used.”
That’s what The One is really about. Not just the parable that inspired the title, but the belief that God goes after people the Church sometimes overlooks. The ones who don’t fit the mold. The ones who ask too many questions. The ones who think altar calls are kind of weird.
Marty knows those people because he is one. And now, he’s finally making music for them.
