Even as his music career careens toward the mainstream—with a fresh acting foray on its heels—Kyle Thomas Harvey, 24, can still be dumbstruck by his own success. The charismatic SoCal rapper and singer best known as Kyle was working on his forthcoming major-label debut when he realized that his new tribute to young love, “Babies,” should be a duet. So he took a chance and texted Grammy-winning pop-soul star Alessia Cara. “And then she came over to my house with her mom,” Kyle gushes to Playboy in a surfer’s drawl. “We sat in my living room and talked for hours, then Alessia cut the rawest verse I’d ever heard. I was just like, ‘Jesus, what is life right now?'”

But that’s just one in a string of nonstop victories. Kyle’s album Light of Mine, which arrived via Atlantic Records on his birthday, May 18, includes appearances by other buzzing alt-R&B risers Khelani and Khalid, plus rap vet 2 Chainz. In March, Kyle was the official artist of ESPN’s college basketball campaign. In April, he pulled Chance the Rapper onstage during his performance at Coachella. In June, he embarks on a hotly tipped U.S. tour supporting Logic. And later this year, we’ll see him play lead opposite Blair Underwood and Teyana Taylor in the Netflix original movie The After Party. Oh, and while on set, Kyle met his all-time favorite rapper, Jadakiss, who gave him advice which, considering Kyle’s trajectory, really just confirms he’s doing everything right: “Keep yourself open to new ideas and people. That’s how you’re going to stick around forever.”

You might assume that the big, single-gold-tooth-flashing grin on Kyle’s face is simply a side effect of all of this, but that’s backwards. The man’s beaming happiness is, in no small part, the source of his blooming stardom. His 2017 crossover moment came from “iSpy,” an exceedingly cheery-sounding song that features the similarly posi-minded Lil Yachty, and includes the boast, “I ain’t frown since ’06.” The song’s video, which has a quarter of a billion views, superimposes the artists’ faces on toddlers’ bodies as they play at the beach. Everything about it runs counter to common (and unfairly narrow) assumptions about hip-hop. For some, Kyle’s love for bright melodies, colorful fashion and general goodwill is refreshing. For others, this joyful new strain of rap—see also Chance, Yachty and Dram—is blithe. For Kyle, it’s actually kinda hardscrabble.

“I go through real shit, too, but I’m not going to allow life to beat me down into the depressed, angry person I’ve seen so many peers and loved ones become.”

“Being happy is an everyday fight,” he says. “I go through real shit, too, but I’m not going to allow life to beat me down into the depressed, angry person I’ve seen so many peers and loved ones become. The title of this album represents self-love—connecting with the power everybody has inside to be their own light source. It’s a survival story inspired by me being in my darkest time.”

Kyle alludes to this on Light of Mine‘s “Ups & Downs“: “2016 hit me like a bag of bricks, 2017 switched up like, ‘Ooh! It’s lit!’ / I nearly had a mental breakdown, and eight months later, I had a hit / I guess life is like box of chocolates, huh? You never know what you finna get.” In person, he avoids specifics but cops to a period of losing friends, distancing himself from relatives and obsessing over his professional shortcomings. And then, “A lot of real problems hit me and my family at once,” he says. “I was like, ‘Yo! I learned to love myself, to be kind, to follow my dreams and to be fearless.’ I thought I’d gotten over all the obstacles, but I still found myself depressed.”

He had managed ups and downs before as the son of a single mother in the working-class Los Angeles suburb of Reseda, living in a too-small house with seven family members. His distaste for most rap (“It was about material bullshit I never was going to have”), preference for role-playing games (“I was kind of a nerd”) and childhood speech impediment pretty much guaranteed he’d be bullied. And he was. But then came a freak “up.” His grandfather’s business partner passed away and left his grandfather everything, including a home in affluent Ventura, about an hour up the coast. And so, “On some real Jeffersons shit, all eight of us moved on up,” Kyle remembers.

At Ventura High, he enrolled in drama, where he came out of his shell playing Skelly Mannor in The Rimers of Eldritch and Seaweed Stubbs in Hairspray—characters who wore their inner truth on the outside. He got that same thrill, exponentially so, hearing Kid Cudi’s 2009 debut Man on the Moon at 16. “It almost felt like I was free, like I broke out of prison,” says Kyle. “One, I grew up listening to all kinds of music, and this was an artist who blended every genre into one thing. And two, I finally got to hear somebody making music about what’s going on inside their heart.”

He was transformed almost literally. He started going by Super Duper Kyle, giving out high-fives and compliments on campus, then going home to record mixtapes. He called his first significant release Beautiful Loser (2013), after the 1975 Bob Seger song, and filled it with tracks befitting a dork-cum-party-starting-MC, like “Fruit Snacks & Cups of Patron” or “Sex and Super Smash Bros.” He rode a surfboard over his crowds, and sent money to his mom and siblings. As with all worthy superhero origin stories, though, pain lurked just beyond the frame. Initially, it was the death of a friend who’d been shot by police. On 2015’s mixtape Smyle, it was loved ones lost to drugs and alcohol.

“Sometimes, people miss the meaning because the way I rap and present myself is so happy,” Kyle admits. “That’s why with this album, I felt I needed to go deeper and be more transparent.” Of course, he can claim that all he likes, but whatever depth or clarity Light of Mine possesses will be a reflection of the progress Kyle’s made in his daily battle for happiness; it’s an internal process. He attributes the rise of upbeat rap to “generational inspiration,” being raised on Cudi, Drake, Kanye West and others who broke from expectation to be “unapologetically themselves.” Since those pioneers have gone on to suffer wages of fame—depression, paranoia and Kanye-ness, respectively—Kyle’s attempt at self-care is itself a meaningful thing. His song with Khalid is called “iMissMe” and is literally about carving out some “me time.” That’s it, and it’s enough.

These days, “me time” for Kyle is “completely chilling with my door locked, playing Assassin’s Creed Origins with the blinds down, or watching three-hour mafia movies uninterrupted, ordering food from Postmates and not thinking about much.” But he’s not likely to get a whole lot of that in the near future. After acting in The After Party, he’s already “thirsting” for his next role. There are always more wins to be had. “I know it sounds funny for a rapper to say, but it was always a dream of mine to be on Broadway,” says Kyle. Oddly, we think Jadakiss would be proud.