Behind the mic: Breeze Mantana

Breeze Mantana is not your average jiggy, he doesn’t just release music; he curates an aesthetic. Carrying himself with a Magna Carta-level poise and a penchant for luxury-noir narratives, Mantana occupies a lane of its own. From afternoons at Pete Rocks’s house to linking with Rome Streetz and Your Old Droog on their european tour, the rapper talks: upbringing, what to expect on the album and the meaning of artistic cohesiveness and authenticity.

Man, new project coming through, how we feelin’? What can you tell me about it?

Wolves in Vicuña, it’s a follow-up to the last project Breakfast at Christie’s (2025) entirely produced by Chase N. Cashe. It’s just continuing the storyline [from the last album], just like the Bond films. They never have the same titles, there’s never like a sequel, it’s just an ongoing thing. And obviously, going with Chase again, I mean, it adds up.

A logical choice.

Right. A logical choice. We work real well together, so once we started building a relationship, it’s been real easy and seamless to work with. 
And, you know, he’s a legend, so…

Yeah, on that, how did you connect with one another?

Uh, it’s really weird. 
So, um, it’s like the craziest thing ever. There used to be this page that told stories about old hustlers called: Mecapopolis. Some dude posted a picture, like old pictures of Tyson Beckford who used to be a Ralph Lauren model, but he also had ties to the streets. 
So, um, I had a personal story about him, and I commented on the picture and Chase liked the comment that I made, and I guess after the comment, he went and looked on my page and he just DM’d me after that. And he was like: “yo, like, like, you’re nice. 
I fuck with you. I like what you got going on. We should work”.

So you connected online?

We already have mutual acquaintances, like my man, Money Makin’ Nique, my man Jay Prezi from Harlem. Like, there’s a bunch of people we both knew but I never interacted with him before. So after that comment, he took it upon himself to go on my page and just start checking me out. And he fucked with me off of that. 
He did LaFlame off of my project Too Greedy (2023), and then, after that, he was like, “yo, like, we should lock in for a full joint”, and that’s how Breakfast at Christie’s was made.

Yeah, about the album man, is there already a planned drop for it?

Uh, sometimes the top of second quarter. I don’t want to give you an exact date yet because there’s still things I’m going to tie up.
I wanted to get it out this quarter, but I had a couple of issues as far as like, uh, trying to wrap up like the last bits of the project.

By going through your catalog, number wise, a lot of your biggest joints have features on them, and I wanted to ask you if with this new project you’re planning to go on a solo thing or it’s gonna be future heavy. What about it?

Yeah, the features are gonna be real low with this project, kinda like with Breakfast at Christie’s, it wasn’t really feature heavy aside from, you know, my guy Todd Zack Jr., singing on a hook, Will Hill and Money Makin’ Nique. I kind of want to keep it in the same vein, don’t want to stray too much away from that, because my biggest thing is: when I’m doing shows, I want people to hear me.

Even though it’s cool that I could perform like a song and a hook or something and then cut it off and go to another joint, I want the people to get a full song of me. Like, I’m still introducing people to myself. 

As far as your sound goes, you display a very distinct, polished aesthetic, with a luxury-noir twist to it. From your lyrics, anyone can obviously understand you saw things happening. So, when it comes to writing, do you build from an internal mood or do you find yourself reacting to what’s happening around you?

So, I haven’t been… I’m not that far removed from the streets.
It’s been a while, but it hasn’t been that long. I’ve been in the street most of my life. I jumped off the porch when I was 12 years old,
so from there all the way up until 30 I had so much life experience to talk about.

When I’m writing, I like to convey a mix of what I’m going through currently, or my mind state currently; and also just observations or just wittiness, certain intricacies or whatever like run patterns and stuff like that.
But I always pull from real life experiences as well, trying to keep everything authentic. I don’t like to make up a bunch of shit just because it sound hot.

I don’t really like to do that because when you see me in person, I want you to be able to see what you heard. 
So I’m not gonna rap about a bunch of cars that I don’t have. I’ll rap about the cars that I do have.
I’ll rap about this, the stuff that you gon’ see me with, you know what I’m saying?

When I heard Acquired Taste (2024) and especially Breakfast at Christie’s, it reminded me of that Roc Marciano type of delivery, you know  “I got Lamborghini dreams/Nissan nightmares” type of stuff. Is he someone you think about while writing?

I love Roc. I can’t say that I necessarily get inspired by him to write most of my inspiration comes from older rappers, rappers I grew up listening to, and that’s why I’m so fixated on authenticity and things like that. It’s because of people like: Nas, Jay-Z, Kool G, Mase, Cam, DJ Clue. Like, I’m a real student of the game.

I pay attention to what’s going on now and I’m also a student of what happened before me.
So, yeah, I get inspired by the new guys too, everybody that’s doing their thing in underground space: Griselda, Roc, Larry June, Curren$y but at the same time I’m doing me, my story.

You mentioned a lot of rappers from the same area as you. You were born in Yonkers, but raised in Mount Vernon, New York.
It is a place, especially for the Italian audience that I think it might require some explanation, like it’s very much cloistered off from the city. And so I wanted to ask you, how did growing up there shape you?

Growing up there, I got to see a lot people makin’ it: Pete Rock, Denzel Washingotn, Mary J. Blige, they all come from Mount Vernon.

We’re really close to the Bronx. Like, you can literally cross the street in some places and be in the Bronx so, I grew up in the Bronx too, like going to my cousin’s house and my grandmother’s house, my great grandmother’s house. I tell people all the time, it reminds me a lot of Queens.

Like,  you’ll have a bunch of houses on a nice street, and then you turn around, you turn the corner and there’s liquor stores, crackheads, drug dealing going on. You know what I’m saying? 
But it’s literally, like, around the corner. It’s like you can’t escape it. So every other block is like night and day.

And how did you find yourself involved in this music thing? 
Do you have any specific memory attached to it?

Yeah, um, so when I was around 9 years old, either 9 or 10, my mother was dating who became my younger sister’s father, my sister Anias’s father. And he was in the music business. And, um, he was friends with Pete Rock and with a guy named Tony Dofat, who used to be a Bad Boy producer. And I used to go with him to their houses.

They had the glass houses, the studios, and things that just spit out to me like “oh, you can have this from music”. But going to Pete Rock’s house is what changed my life. This was around the time where Biggie died, like Biggie had just died and I remember this because when my mother first started dating this guy, he was playing Life After Death (1997) a lot in his truck. He took us to his house and Pete just had like a bunch of video games, like every video game if you think of at that time but then we went downstairs in his studio.

The whole entire basement floor was covered with crates. Like, he had made a path where you could walk to the studio, but most of the floor was covered in vinyls. So just seeing that and seeing a studio setup, it inspired me from that day ike: “I wanna rap”.

We would go downtown, like in Manhattan, and he’ll take us with him in studios and label offices where they’ll have like the big TVs, bunch of magazines: The Source, XXL and Billboard. So it was a bunch of different things that led me to wanting to rap. He gifted me CDs from the labels: Fat Joe‘s Don Cartagena (1998), Camron’s Confessions of Fire (1998), DJ Crew’s The Professional (1998), Big Pun’s Capital Punishment (1998). From there I knew I wanted to rap, you couldn’t tell me about hip-hop. I wanted to rap.

I bet a lot of people would dream of that.

Yeah [laughs].

So, while rapping, getting to the pad you know, how do you approach the first step towards a project? You start by listening to random stuff or you prefer setting up a narrative for it and then acting as a consequence?

So, a lot of times, prior to Hors D’oeuvres (2021), I would probably listen to a bunch of beats and then come up with a title. I probably just listen to a bunch of beats and then, once I get a bunch of records that mesh well together, then I’d start, like, chiseling away. But once I did Hors D’oeuvres it’s more going from the title, picking sounds that would fit and then getting to the writing.


What’s it gon’ sound like? That’s what I would ask myself. 
And then, you know, providing the soundscape for it I’d go on painting that blank canvas. Right now I have a list in my phone of probably like 40 or 50 titles. 
The majority of them I’ll probably use in my career or whatever, Lord willin’. I plan on dropping a lot more times than just one time a year. I’m gonna turn up my productivity.

You actually anticipated me. Productivity wise, from Let Us Cook 2 (2022), you’ve been dropping more constantly, like year after year. I mean, obviously the pressure to keep putting out music to stay visible, I mean, it can be exhausting. How do you balance, especially in the modern music industry, the need to protect your artistic integrity with the need to stay relevant?

So, like, I never dropped more than one time a year, simply because I always felt like, you know “my time is my time, and when I’m coming, I’m coming” you know? I don’t like to be rushed because of what everybody else is doing.

But at the same time, um, there’s a few reasons as to why I would release more than once a year. One, I have a bunch of different concepts and tires that I want to use, and in order for me to even scratch the surface on those projects, I would have to drop more than once. So that’s one thing. Um, just looking at my career I feel like I should have a larger discography.

When I look at my contemporaries and a lot of the guys that’s really doing a thing right now, their careers changed once they started releasing a lot more…

Yeah, I mean, look at Griselda, for example. The Boldys, the Rome Streetzs…

Yeah, exactly. Their careers went up, not just because they released more but because there’s a whole bunch of other work that goes behind that. And that’s something that I haven’t explored here. 
It’s just about, you know, making sure no stuff goes unturned.
You know what I’m saying?

Like you said, the game is changing and also too, I know that there’s a lot of people that, like, do it because it’s like algorithm games. 
But, like I said, ultimately, it started because I’m looking at my discography and I felt like I should have more quality bodies at work.

Down here, in Italy, and Europe in general, we often feel like the amount of music dropping, coming out of the States, I don’t want to sound extra, but seems excessive. It’s a fucking overflow sometimes you know, having to keep up with all the drops. And the first thing that comes to mind is, like, the quality of the product gets diluted in a way and you get the exact opposite result.

That’s also one of my greatest issues with releasing more than one project a year, because there’s individuals that I may listen to that drop multiple projects a year and those projects don’t really hit the mark as far as like complete bodies of work. 
I’m real keen on, like, cohesiveness and, you know, concise projects.
But there’s also freedom and the need to express.

It’s like having a baby, you know what I’m saying? I don’t have like a bunch of music that I recorded that I’m holding on to. While a lot of artists, they record at a quicker clip. But that’s another thing that changed with my career too, I started recording from home. Acquired Taste was the first I recorded.

Now, especially after my Chinatown Sound Freestyle, my inbox is just obliterated with people sending me beats and that just gets me in the mood to put the pen down and close myself in a room to record it. And that changed things for me a lot as far as like just getting ideas down.
You know what I mean?

And that productivity got you to Europe man. First of all, congratulations bro. Getting to open for great artists like Rome and Droog, how you feeling about it? How did you get introduced to those guys?

Well I have a relationship with Rome’s manager, shout out to Coach BomBay. I’ve been working with them, specifically with Coachsince 2021, I believe. He was on tour in 2021 and I went on the road with them for a show in Tucson, Arizona. From that, we built a relationship and I went back on the road with them.

I was supposed to go to Europe with them in 2023 when I released Too Greedy, but I had some personal stuff going on so I wasn’t able to go at the time. Droog, I never actually met Droog, so this would be my first time meeting, but I’ve been a fan of his since people thought he was Nas. You know, that was like 2011 or something like that.
Yeah, when nobody knew what he looked like. So I’ve always been tapped in with who Droog was, but yeah, this will be my first time meeting.

So, you’ve been locked in at the home studio cooking up the next drop. With Chase feeding you beats, what’s the workflow like when you’re locking in the final mix? Do y’all have those deep sessions breaking down the sonics and the overall energy of the joint, or do you just let the raw vibe dictate the play?

So Wolves in Vicuña,  like I said, it’s a follow up to Breakfast at Christie’s, but it doesn’t sound exactly the same.

I mean, just off of the title, it sounds way darker.

Yeah, exactly. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time when I came up with the title, but when Chase first started sending me beats, when I told him the title, like he was sending me all these dark ass beats [laughs]. At first I was a little bit thrown off because I’m like, I knew it had to be, like, some dark elements to the project, but at the same time it sounds way different from Breakfast at Christie’s.

Chase kept it real with me from the jump: stop trying to chase Breakfast at Christie’s status. He told me not to worry about outdoing the sonics on that last joint. His whole vibe was, “This isn’t a contest with your old self—it’s just the next chapter”. You know, this is like the aftermath of the robbery (Breakfast at Christie’s). From that I started asking myself, if it’s the aftermath, what type of things would you deal with? And it’s like you’re dealing with like paranoia, you’re dealing with like trust issues, you’re dealing with just all of these different emotions and feelings, hence the darker mood.

So then I started applying that thought process to that and also just things I got a chance to just revisit, old feelings and things that I haven’t talked about before.

So that was the key to finally closing the book on Christie’s and moving forward, wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, that’s my most successful project to this date as far as like reception, you know what I’m saying…

On first listen, this album felt way more intentional than your previous drops—especially in the delivery. I mean, you’ve clearly pushed that whole “high-end mogul-robbery” narrative a million levels higher this time around.

That also comes from having a Grammy award-winning producer like Chase on your side. Having somebody with his experience and him being able to lend some type of like guidance, not like lyric wise, but just like sonically and saying like, you know, “this is how we’re gonna do this”. Like, I’ve never had that before, with this one Chase was a lot hands-on.

Even from a distance, like just speaking on the phone, we’ll just have conversations about a bunch of different things. From random stuff, to him just boosting me and telling me like “yo, you that dude, like, you that nigga, like, you know what I’m saying? Like, like, you nice”. Just him putting that battery in my back, that’s what really changed a lot for me. Like, I always felt like I would reach a new level if I could find somebody or people that was willing to get in the mud with me. He did.

Absolutely. Yeah, man, what can I say, can’t wait to listen to the project.

I love for you to hear it and get your feedback.

Thank you for stopping by, man. Hope we’ll see you here anytime soon, that’d be great.

Oh definitely man, I’m a big fan of Italian culture, obviously you can hear it, the food, all of that. And you know, one of my guys, Tusco from Italy too, met him in person in New York for the first time. So yeah, I’d love to come out there soon, who knows…