Leland Wayne is Metro Boomin, the breakout producer behind a trap music renaissance now fully in progress, straight outta Atlanta. The 22-year-old St. Louis native led the charge along with a small collective of producer peers all working out of and connected by ATL’s legendary Patchwork Studios, including TM88, Zaytoven, Sonny Digital, Southside—and of course, Mike Will Made-It.

Metro played bass guitar in a band before getting a laptop from his mom and downloading the beat-making program FruityLoops, a tool he uses to this day. His plan was always to move to Atlanta after graduating high school. “It was like Hollywood as far as music is concerned, like how actors move to L.A.,” he recalls. Metro attended Morehouse College as a business major for a semester.

When a beat he made called Karate Chop caught the attention of Future and Lil Wayne, Metro dropped out of college to focus on music fulltime.

Since then, he’s turned out a steady flow of underground hits for YG, Migos, Young Thug, 2 Chainz, Wiz Khalifa, Jeezy, and Ty Dolla $ign, among a crazy long list of others and is the co-architect behind Future’s whole sonic situation on DS2 plus the three mixtapes that preceded it.

2015 has been straight fire, with many of his productions reaching new heights, including the platinum-selling smash “Tuesday” by iLoveMakonnen, an iconic beat for the song “3500” that helped unleash Travi$ Scott’s whole Rodeo on the world—and capped off with the boundary-pushing collabo featuring Drake and Future as executive producer of the #1 selling mixtape/album What a Time to Be Alive.

“Metro Boomin, he’s the next artist going out,” predicts DJ Esco, Future’s right-hand man and Magic City Strip Club's reigning Monday night king. “I play nothing but Metro beats at Magic. All these songs you’re hearing? Metro. He’s in the DJ booth with me.”

Metro says he stays super-focused by eschewing drugs—ironic considering the subject matter of trap music is distinctly that. “I think the fact that I don’t do any drugs at all helps me keep focused,” he told the Fader in 2013. “I’m used to being around weed, I’m not bothered by it, but I just don’t smoke by choice. I can’t smoke and make beats. It makes me feel lazy, and I like to get a lot done.”

This has been Metro’s crossover year; he's now one of the most on-demand producers in the industry. But he has no intention of typecasting himself.

“It’s not like there’s just this one thing that I want to do—I'm versatile,” he recently told Hypetrack. “I’m not just trying to consolidate or 'just make rap beats' or 'just make trap beats.' The sky is the limit; music is music. I want to do it all, because at the end of the day, I look at myself as just a musician, period."