To know the vulnerable and candid songs of honestav is to know Av Freeman: a determined, kindred soul who, in the face of unimaginable odds and loss, found himself a breakout hit (2024’s “I’d Rather Overdose”) and a ticket out of rural Missouri. Growing up the youngest of four brothers and a sister, he caught the music bug early: “They all wanted to be rockstars,” Av says. “I was a little kid going and watching my sixteen-year-old brother play screamo shows in bowling alleys and pizza joints. I was hooked. I wanted it bad.”

He split his time between his parents, spending half the month with his mother and half with his dad. “My mom was the worst tweaker ever,” he explains. “She lived in the hood and got arrested multiple times selling meth.” Life with his father was relatively stable, but still not comfortable. “There was no A.C. and no food,” Av says, “but I was going to school and playing sports. Half the month, I was the quarterback, and the other half, I was running around with no socks, smoking cigarettes with the worst kids.”

From the start, Av’s music was a response to tragedy; at age fifteen, Av found his brother dead from suicide. Amid this grief, Av adopted a tough-guy rap persona. He recorded music obsessively, releasing a song a week for over a hundred weeks in a row. “Literally for two years,” he says. “Sometimes I’d drop even more. I’d record four songs in a night and post two of them.” These years of experimentation reveal themselves in Av’s blend of folk and hip-hop, which sees scratchy verses layered over sensitive acoustic guitars.

After graduating high school, Av paid his bills selling weed. “I thought that’s how I was going to live,” he says. “I’d just be a dude that sells weed. I didn’t even think about the rockstar thing.” Then he got hired as a mover. He held that job for four years. “It was a grind, and I stayed up in the studio every night,” he remembers. “I’d go to work at 6:30 AM after being up until 4 AM recording music. It was draining.”

When Av started making jokes on TikTok, he believed he had finally found his way out. The social media platform paid for views, and his videos reached millions and millions of viewers. “At first I thought, ‘I’m about to get rich.’ I quit my job and shit. But I started spending all my money on studio time. I made enough to afford an apartment, but I was living out of my truck.”

But in January of 2024, tragedy struck again. Av’s father committed suicide. On the truck ride home, Av, through tears, wrote a new song documenting his emotions. Rushing to the studio, Av cut the track and uploaded it as had become routine. Almost overnight, “I’d Rather Overdose” exploded, cracking multiple Billboard charts and amassing over 70 million streams globally. “When my dad died, music turned into therapy for me,” Av says. “I’m not making songs to be cool anymore—this is what I gotta do to get through the day. I’m lucky that people hear it.” Now, following a bidding war between every major label, Av is on track to purchase his first home.

His newest music is rugged and open. honestav belts rhymes about partying and drug addiction, self-loathing and suicide, stifling emotions and trying to open up. “When my brother killed himself, I turned into a punk ass sixteen-year-old,” he says. “When my dad did it, it hit different. It took a different spin. I’m a grown ass man now. If I wasn’t making these songs, I don’t think I’d be alive.”

Still, Av is shocked that this intimacy and introspection connected with such a wide audience. “It seems like people actually started to relate more when I stopped making music for everyone else,” he says. “That’s when they really started listening.”

As his music gains traction, Av has encountered pressures to capitalize on the moment. Industry executives (and even other artists) have encouraged him to lean into familiar tropes of country music. But as honestav, Av has a strong sense of who he is and where he comes from. “I grew up in the country, but I wasn’t farming,” he clarifies. “I’m from that, but I’m not that. My homies were farming, but I was riding dirt bikes and busting out windows.” With the success he’s found trusting his instincts, Av is determined to keep his music close to his heart.