Credit: Joseph Higgins

Baby Keem has opened up about suffering from health issues out of the public eye.

The Las Vegas rapper released his debut album, The Melodic Blue, in September 2021, with the song ‘Family Ties’ featuring Kendrick Lamar winning him a Grammy for ‘Best Rap Performance’.

Instead of instantly capitalising on the success, Keem has revealed that he was unwell and forced into a hiatus.

While the exact issues are unknown, they were bad enough that he wasn’t able to record music for an entire year.

“I’ll never be super public about what it was because I don’t want that to be the narrative,” he told Highsnobiety. “Going through that was the hardest setback for me. You have all these [moments] where you’re like, ‘Damn, I really won’t make music ever again.’”

He continued, “I turned off my Twitter. I didn’t need to see people telling me to release when I physically could not make music for a year. I had to learn how to do it again. It really fucked me up to where I didn’t want to go outside at all.”

Keem made his big return in February with Ca$ino, his second studio album. The project peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 chart with features from Kendrick, Too $hort, Denzel Curry, and others.

In a trailer for the album, Kendrick said, “I understood the hardship before he was born – just the history of our family in general. We don’t call ourselves the hillbillies for nothing. This is a story of a warfare environment and a warfare, psychologically, to try and change our generational curses.”

The 25-year-old is currently finishing up his North American tour and will be heading overseas to Europe later this year.