Marty has spent most of his career learning how Christian hip-hop works from the inside. For years, he was one half of Social Club Misfits, the genre-bending duo that helped bring a looser, weirder energy to faith-based rap. He spent time in the label system, learned the expectations that come with it and eventually walked away to build something of his own: Apollo Records.
Now, in his second year as a full-time solo artist, Marty has found the role he wants to play. He’s the disruptor who looks at the room, notices the tension everyone keeps avoiding and decides to put it in a song.
“I want people to know that I’m a disruptor,” Marty said. “I’m like, just set it on fire. Let’s just talk about it. Let’s just be honest about it.”
Apollo Records is the next chapter of that story. Marty talks about it as a way to build a lane for artists who want real careers without sanding off everything that makes them interesting. After years of navigating the industry as part of Social Club Misfits, he wants to help other artists figure out how to make music full time without letting the machine decide what they’re allowed to say.
“My goal for myself is to do well so that I may bring other people,” Marty said. “That’s the whole thing about Apollo. I want to teach my artists, I want to teach the people in my circle how to be full time.”
That mission runs through his new album, Cult Classic, a project built from the songs that first made music feel electric to him as a kid. He points to Smash Mouth and Missy Elliott, Timbaland and Will Smith’s Big Willie Style — records that felt strange and massive before music became something to optimize.
“Every song on the album points back to a song that got me excited when I was a kid,” Marty said. “I really wanted to create this atmosphere or soundscape of everything that I loved growing up.”
For Marty, nostalgia becomes fuel. Cult Classic jumps between sounds the way his mind jumps between ideas, chasing the feeling of surprise rather than the comfort of a neatly defined lane. He likes the weird turns. He likes the unpredictability. Cohesion, in his world, comes from personality more than polish.
“I actually prefer a schizophrenic album, just being honest with you,” he said. “There’s certain trends in hip-hop that are just so overdone that I get very, very bored.”
Boredom might be the true villain in Marty’s story. He knows how to make a song that fits the expected shape. He knows the BPMs and the hooks. After years in the label system, he’s become more interested in songs that sound like a person thinking out loud in real time.
“I’ve stopped going away from what I want it to sound like, starting the initial conversation of an album,” he said. “Now I’m like, what do I want to say?”
That question gives Cult Classic its pulse. Marty’s songs are full of jokes, pop culture references and spiritual frustration. He talks about Russell Brand’s public Christian turn, political hypocrisy, church silence, labels that passed on him and later asked for help, online outrage and the strange moral theater of American life.
Some of it is funny because Marty has timing. Some of it lands because the joke is sitting on top of something true.
“I don’t ever want to be political,” he said. “I don’t want to be anything but somebody who has the freedom to say what he wants to say.”
That freedom comes with a comment section. Marty recently posted a clip of a song from his upcoming unreleased album and quickly found himself getting, in his words, “diabolically destroyed.” The lyric referenced Erika Kirk, which immediately set off accusations that he was making fun of a widow.
Marty saw the backlash as proof of the exact tension he’s trying to name: a culture so anxious and reactive that even a joke becomes a referendum.
“I think people are afraid,” he said. “It’s hard first off to have a thought that maybe goes against everyone around you. It’s hard to have a thought and to properly communicate that.”
Humor, he believes, gets there faster. It cuts through the throat-clearing. It lets him say the thing people are thinking before they’ve figured out how to say it without detonating their group chat.
“I find that humor cuts through it a lot quicker,” he said.
That’s why Marty talks about comedians with the kind of reverence many rappers reserve for legacy artists: Bill Burr, Shane Gillis, Larry David. The people who make a room laugh and then make everyone realize they’ve just been handed a diagnosis.
“I would probably say that they inspire me more than hip-hop artists do,” Marty said. “I feel like they’re really honest. And I love that. I want to be more honest in my music.”
Honesty, for Marty, means staying in the unresolved part of faith long enough to say something useful. He’s interested in the questions believers are actually carrying: what Christians believe when politics becomes identity, what public faith means when celebrity conversions double as brand repair and why so many people keep repeating convictions they haven’t really examined.
Right now, one of the themes he keeps coming back to is belief itself.
“One of the themes that I have in my house is that I just don’t think anyone believes in anything,” he said. “People act like they believe. They’re just repeating.”
For Marty, music becomes a way to test the language Christians use. What do believers actually mean when the moment gets complicated? What happens when the sermon vocabulary doesn’t quite reach the crisis in front of us? How do Christians talk about anger and hypocrisy without turning everything into a slogan?
He’s especially animated when he talks about the church’s silence around current events. He loves his church, but he also feels the gap between what people are living through and what many leaders seem willing to address.
“I’m struggling with churches being silent on a lot of issues,” he said. “What does my pastor think about what’s going on right now? Those are genuine questions that I have.”
His frustration comes from a desire for stronger faith and better discipleship. Marty wants Christian artists and leaders to engage the actual world their people are living in. He wants room for questions that don’t arrive pre-approved. He wants believers to laugh, wrestle and still belong.
“I want to be the best believer I could be,” he said. “I want to be the best man of God I could be for my family.”
He’s clear-eyed about the current music economy. Singles move quickly and attention is hard to grab on to. The algorithm asks artists to keep feeding it while preserving enough depth to make work that lasts. Marty still believes albums matter because albums give artists enough room to make a statement.
“I feel like the album is a lost art,” he said. “An album just says something. It’s like a bigger statement.”
The title Cult Classic fits because Marty understands that his music may need time to find its people. He’s making work for the delayed reaction — the laugh that turns into a thought, the bar that feels like a joke until it starts sounding like the point of the whole song.
“I have something to say,” he said. “Every song has a statement. Every song, there’s a reason why I made it.”
Marty is carving out space for Christian rap that can be funny and spiritually honest without flattening itself into branding or sermons. He wants to make people laugh, and he even wants to make them uncomfortable enough to pay attention. But most of all, he wants his music to sound like someone is awake to the absurdity of the moment.
“I don’t want to be the number one rapper in the world,” he said. “I’m trying to be somebody who sparks this disruption and embraces the chaos.”
