Just over a year after exploding onto the music scene, rapper Kinji00 and producer Lb66 continue to boldly evolve while avoiding repeating the same sovereignist rap formula.
This is the kind of family story we all love: a story of two brothers that begins in a childhood bedroom and before you know it, it ends up on major stages in front of tens of thousands of people.
At first, Lb66, the older brother, had taught himself FL Studio, the go-to software for any young hip-hop producer—especially “the cracked version,” as Kinji00 puts it.
“But we’ve paid for it since!” Lb66 says, laughing.
After some online success in the early 2020s as part of Novagang—an international collective that was highly influential in the rise of digicore, a musical style blending trap and hyperpop—Lb66 passed his production knowledge on to his brother, who’s four years younger. “He showed me the basics, but I quickly wanted to try rapping. We just started by making a track, without overthinking it. The chemistry was already working really well,” Kinji00 recalls.
“But I have to say, he may have been overdoing it a bit at first,” the rapper adds.
“Yeah, I was a bit hard on him,” Lb66 confirms. “I made him redo his verses countless times, but I’ve mellowed, now. We trust each other more.”
A few months after their duo became official, Miguel and Léonardo Monteiro-Beauchamp, who are based in Gatineau and born in Portugal, went viral online with one of their first songs, Fleur de lys (2024), which became an anthem for young sovereignists. At a time when Québec rappers seem largely drawn to pop-leaning or grittier incarnations of trap and the drumless aesthetic—a production style built around raw sampling—the brothers burst onto the scene with a sovereignist rap proposition rooted in plugg influences, a subgenre that’s hugely popular online and generally defined by airy moods and melodies, along with lush, even maximalist, instrumentation.
This singular offering from the Monteiro-Beauchamp brothers quickly emerged from the underground to become the cultural phenomenon of the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not an exaggeration to say that part of Québec’s music industry was caught off guard.
To wit: Les Francos de Montréal hadn’t invited the brothers to be part of its 2025 lineup, “but we went anyway! We joined P’tit Belliveau onstage to perform Fleur de lys in front of 30,000 people. It was wild!” Kinji 00 recalls.
Since then, they’ve had one milestone after another: a debut album (À la prochaine fois) released on June 24; appearances at several festivals over the summer: an appearance on Tout le monde en parle (Québec’s highest-rated talk show) in October, a collaboration with Hubert Lenoir—one of their idols—in November, and a first live show in France in December, a kind of prelude to their first European tour, which is in full swing as these lines are being written.
Not bad at all for two dudes who are 18 and 22. “What’s happening is really crazy, but the biggest thing for me is the tour in France. I said I’d get a big fleur de lys tattooed on my chest if we ever booked that tour,” Kinji00 says. Remains to be seen if he will keep his word.
Kinji00 during a concert in France in May 2026. The fleur de lys tattoo is nowhere to be seen… yet. (Photo Yan Bienvenue)
The Importance of Broadening One’s Horizons
Last February, the guys surprised their fans with SHADOW WIZARD QUÉBEC GANG, an electro- and hyperpop-tinged mini-album created in collaboration with the Montréal collective Shadow Wizard Money Gang, and that’s precisely when we collectively understood that they wouldn’t be pigeonholed. “We do what we want, that’s all. I wouldn’t say we don’t care about the Québec industry… but let’s just say we’re never going to force ourselves to fit their standards,” the rapper insists. He celebrated his 18th birthday onstage on November 20, during the launch of the ICI Musique hip-hop channel at Ausgang Plaza in Montréal.
One of the “standards” they are referring to is the clash they feel between their “Franglais” (a mix of French and English, call it Frenglish) and the language quotas that come with certain grants. “We didn’t have the right count for À la prochaine fois, which is paradoxical because we’re really Québecois,” Lb66 points out.
“To me, it’s ridiculous to be afraid of English in Québec,” Kinji00 adds. “There’s nothing more Québecois than Franglais, our own form of French language using English expressions. We’re the only ones who have that. We shouldn’t be afraid of it—we should celebrate it.”
The two Portuguese artists have, as you might have surmised, an inclusive and outward-looking vision of Québec. The rapper continues: “Our goal at the beginning was to make independence less taboo for everyone. I wanted everyone in Québec to be able to say, ‘I’m a sovereignist,’ without it being a big deal or sounding racist.”
Even though Québec’s sovereignty remains his subject of choice, Kinji00 wants to explore other themes in his next songs, a shift he had already begun on SHADOW WIZARD QUÉBEC GANG. “I think that by now, people have figured out that I’m a sovereignist,” he says with a smirk. “Now, I want to put some positivity into the world; I want people to feel good when they listen to my music. I want to boost their self-confidence.”
Kinji 00 and Lb66’s Festival circuit tour:
June 13—Montréal (Les Francos)
June 20—Carleton-sur-Mer (Festival BleuBleu)
July 3—Saguenay (La Noce)
July 4—Trois-Rivières (Festivoix)
July 18—Val-d’Or (Frimat)
July 25—Baie-Saint-Paul (Le Festif!)
August 4—Rouyn-Noranda (Osisko en Lumière)
August 17—Québec (SuperFrancoFête)