Well-versed in Philly’s no-nonsense hip-hop lineage—from Beanie Sigel to Meek Mill—Chynna offers unflinching lyricism and a head-spinning array of flows. But the overall aesthetic and sentiment within her Music is influenced by other genres as well, including psychedelic rock and emo. Her 2015 EP I’m Not Here. This Isn’t Happening, for example, was named for a Radiohead lyric, and at one point during our lunch in Manhattan’s Chinatown, close to her current apartment, she reveals a My Chemical Romance T-shirt underneath her sweater. Though she admits the emo-rap trend is starting to become played-out, her combination of styles feels especially potent, drawn from her own harrowing recent history.

In early 2016, as her music was racking up thousands of streams and views, Chynna was in the throes of an opiate addiction: the result, she says, of suppressing negative feelings rather than facing them head-on. In this grim period, music still offered her some semblance of redemption. That August, on her 22nd birthday, when she was just three months sober, she released Ninety, a six-track mixtape riddled with her bleakest truths. “Demons dancing on me like I’ve been feening/Hard to believe I’ve been 90 days clean,” she rhymes hazily on the tape.

Chynna: “PAF” (via SoundCloud)

Even with her pen and pad as a weapon, some demons can be harder to vanquish than others. Last year, exactly 365 days after her graduation from rehab, her mother died, posing a serious challenge to her sobriety. She refused to succumb. “My mom would be really tight with me if I used her as excuse to fall off,” she tells me. “It’s just more reason to work and get all this shit done.” The EP that followed, the woozy music 2 die 2, was a quick four-track punch that allowed listeners a chance to peer into Chynna’s turbulent but resilient mind.

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