“Everybody knows that my city is not the nicest, a little violent, we come from the gutter. She’s still a little guarded (she says she’s somehow found time for a relationship recently, but won’t disclose details-“I’m in love, but it’s a secret”), but mostly is just brimming with pride for her music, her city, and herself.

If you’re wondering how such a young rapper with just a few tapes to her name got so confident, that’s just Dej. It’s about respecting yourself, and not taking any crap,” she says. “That song is a fight-everyone wants to feel that type of way. The song was re-released on her latest free-to-download mixtape, Sell Sole, and has racked up more than 11 million listens on SoundCloud, a phenomenon she attributes to people liking the song’s cockiness. It was “Try Me” this summer, though, that truly got people’s attention-including Drake’s, who expressed his admiration in a comment he wrote on her Instagram.

“Writing is my favorite part.” She started rapping more officially in high school, and after a brief stint in nursing school at college before dropping out (“My mind wasn’t there,” she says), she put out her first official mixtape in 2012, Just Do It. I started to write when I was nine or ten years old, my own little lyrics, listening to anything I could get my hands on,” she says. “I grew up in the projects on the East Side of Detroit and just always loved writing. If this changing of the rap guard seems to be happening fast, Dej has been working towards this for a long time. “And it just stuck-I couldn’t afford loafers when I was growing up, but now I can.” “I told myself in the tenth grade I would stop wearing sneakers, Jordans and Nikes, and that I’d start wearing loafers, that I’d wear so many they were gonna call me Dej Loaf,” she says. Not everyone even makes it that far, so I just did all-white everything, with the Gucci loafer shoes.” Those loafers are an important part of Dej’s story-they’re what inspired Deja Trimble to add “loaf” to her moniker in the first place. “You gotta look right, when you’re doing what you do. “Being on 106 & Park, one of the biggest shows of my childhood, I knew I had to represent for my city, for Detroit,” she says on the phone from Los Angeles, where she’s recording her debut studio album. Case in point, on her first appearance on BET’s long-running video countdown show 106 & Park, she turned up for the interview in a floor-length white mink coat she had bought that same day in New York City. Dej Loaf is only 23 and just two years into her career since releasing a debut mixtape in 2012, but she already walks, talks, and dresses like a legend.

Dej loaf try me