There’s a scepticism that tends to follow any new release from a “rapo baby”, a term coined by Dazed in recent years to describe the children of established rappers now stepping into music themselves. But North West, the 12-year-old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, is silencing her critics with her debut EP, #N0rth4evr.
After signing to the label gamma. in late 2025, she dropped her first solo studio single, “PIERCING ON MY HAND”, back in February. But even before that, she had already racked up a handful of production credits, moved in underground hip-hop circles, and just this week featured on Edward Skeletrix’s “Let’s Have Some Fun”, whose music video includes cameos from some of the scene’s freshest talent.
The six-track EP feels shaped by the internet pathways she – like many Gen Alpha artists – has grown up with. Even the track titles, “H0w sh0uld ! f33l”, “D!e”, and “Th!s t!m3”, read like Roblox usernames or the mashed-up chat of a streamer Discord.
From the first listen, it’s clear that North West is at her best when she’s doing her own thing: the Carti-inspired maximalism, the whiplash melodics of jersey club basslines and pluggnb, and an anything-goes production where the songs that go hardest are blown-out and bouncy. The points where the project feels slightly weighed down are when too many outside hands have been pulled on deck.
While N0rth4evr isn’t flawless (she is 12), it’s far more experimental than cynics might have expected. Below, we rank every track on North West’s debut EP from worst to best.
I’m not ragebaiting by putting the title track last, I swear. The nu-metal-leaning pop-rap experiment “#N0rth4evr” is the one moment on the EP that falls slightly flat. All the ideas are there, but they struggle to cut through the noise – and there’s a lot of it. Maybe it doesn’t help that I’m listening to this at 7am.
The accompanying visuals are harder to fault, though, and the unexpected ad-lib from Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku fits neatly with the EP’s wider fascination with Japanese digital culture.
The title of this track translates from Japanese as “love me” or “please love me”. Here, North once again draws from the Vocaloid world: “Hatsune Miku & North West” is quite a wild pairing to see credited together. The track also samples Kikuo’s 2015 song “Love Me, Love Me, Love Me”, folding its chorus into the production.
As the final track on the EP, it works as a fitting apex to North’s Japanese nu-rock fixation, something we first glimpsed on her feature on FKA twigs’ Eusexua standout “Childlike Things”. Still, it ends up being one of the record’s less memorable cuts.
Kicking off the project is track “H0w Sh0uld ! f33l”, which plugs a sample from Meg & Dia’s 2006 track “Monster” into the opening verse. Here, West’s hyper-charged production amps up immediately, but for all its intensity, it’s also where the singer gets most vulnerable on the project, with lyrics like “All this money turn my heart to a black hole” and “In the back of the Lamb’, it get lonely” heard within the chaos.
I’m not going to lie, the production credit for Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons on this EP had me puzzled. The dad-coded indie-folk band feels worlds away from the North West universe. But the connection makes more sense once the track opens with a sample of artist Social Repose’s rock cover of Mumford & Sons’ “Little Lion Man”.
From there, “Th!s t!m3” snaps into a thumping club beat and genuinely goes hard before looping back to the sample. It’s one of the EP’s clearest examples of North’s anything-goes instincts paying off.
North taps Swedish group Caramell for this one, but it’s in the lyrics where she really shines. She’s got the very specific 12-year-old-in-the-spotlight worldview down as she sings, “I was born a star, I ain’t ever had a choice (had a choice),” over crunching basslines.
When we said North is at her best when she’s doing her own shit, this is what we meant. “D!E” is the point where the project peaks. It’s also North at her most arrogant, firing off lines only the 12-year-old daughter of two A-listers could deliver this casually: “How am I younger than you? How am I younger than you?” and “Once they on trend, I’m already off it (What?)”.
The track opens with a sample of JubyPhonic’s trancey chorus from “Shinitai-chan”, before torpedoing into some raucous maximalist production. What makes this one land is that there’s enough room for North to flex without getting swallowed by the beat, as her “ノースちゃん” tag, translating to North-chan, ricochets throughout. This is clearly a girl who has learned her kana.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.dazeddigital.com ’
