On his newly released mixtape Royal Flush, G.O.O.D. Music signee CyHi the Prynce has a single mission: to lyrically showcase his move from the streets to the royal house.

“I’ve done some things in a negative light, but I want to show the transition from when you go from a street thug to an actual prince, a young man that has values but still keeping it 100 where that street dude will feel me,” he tells staging-rapup.kinsta.cloud.

Fans of the Decatur, Georgia native won’t feel slighted while listening to the tape—CyHi treats listeners to 17 tracks, one of which is particularly meaningful.

“I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from this record called ‘Hero,'” says CyHi of the Taku-produced song. “I like that song because I feel like when everybody is doing something powerful or making a movie or starting a revolution, they tend to, like Jay-Z say, ‘Cut the head off a king.’ At the same time, I’mma be a leader and there’s gonna be a time where I might be approached with some of those same problems, but I don’t want to speak them into existence, so metaphorically speaking I’m like a Martin Luther King or I am a Malcolm X or a Marcus Garvey or a Harriet Tubman, those people. I feel like I’m saving my generation, you feel me.”

While the rapper went for big name producers like J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, he also opted to call on a beatsmith very close to home.

“‘Can’t Find Love’ was produced by my best friend, Actual,” CyHi reveals. “That’s a record about a bachelor, like myself. I haven’t had a girlfriend in about six or seven years. I was brought up in a different kind of household, I had my mother and my father. I had three sisters; I couldn’t disrespect a woman. But it gets lonely sometimes. So you want to tell people, ‘You might not have no girls and can’t find love, but I got a lotta girls and I still can’t find love.’ It’s a different way of looking at it.”

CyHi, a fan of “original sounds,” chose not to rely on heavy bass-driven beats while recording Royal Flush in order to have his message ring clearer than the sound of the 808. “My style is real hip-hop,” he states. “But I bring the Atlanta swag on top of that.”

–Georgette Cline