6LACK Sacramento Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

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About 6LACK

Ricardo Valdez Valentine Jr. was born June 24, 1992 in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Ricardo Valentine Sr., a musician and member of the gospel-leaning group Valentine Brothers in the broader Baltimore-DC area. The family relocated to Atlanta, Georgia when he was a child and he grew up primarily in the East Atlanta neighborhood — the same Zone 6 corridor of southeastern Atlanta that produced Future, Childish Gambino's early Atlanta era, and a deep ecosystem of independent rap and R&B that the LVRN label network would later anchor. He attended Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta city limits, and built an early career writing and rapping under the original spelling of his name — the '6LACK' stylization rooted both in the Zone 6 area-code reference and a phonetic stylization of 'black' that has remained his identity through the entire catalogue. An early development deal in his late teens went dormant after several years without a release, which he has discussed openly across interviews as a formative period that shaped the patient, slow-burn approach of the eventual debut album. The independent rebuild began through Atlanta's LVRN (Love Renaissance) collective — the same management and label group that has anchored Summer Walker, Raury, DRAM, and the broader Atlanta R&B ecosystem — with the first major release the Stoned EP in 2015. The Free 6lack debut album landed through LVRN and Interscope Records on November 18, 2016. PRBLMS, the lead single, became one of the slow-burn R&B breakthroughs of the cycle, certified platinum multiple times over and anchoring the album's nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 60th Grammy Awards. Ahead, the follow-up, landed at gold. The collaborative single OTW with Khalid and Ty Dolla Sign in 2018 brought the catalogue to a much larger pop-leaning radio audience and remains one of the most-streamed releases in the discography. The second album East Atlanta Love Letter dropped September 14, 2018 — a longer, more cinematic record built around the title track, Switch, Nonchalant, and the J. Cole collaboration Pretty Little Fears, which became one of the most heavily streamed Cole features of his catalogue. The 6pc Hot EP in 2020, released through the early pandemic cycle, kept the audience engaged across the gap year. The third studio album Since I Have a Lover arrived March 24, 2023 — a substantially different record from the first two in tone, leaning into pastoral acoustic textures, more direct songwriting around relationships and fatherhood (he became a father during the recording cycle), and a vocal performance that pulled away from the hushed, electronically-treated rap-adjacent identity of the early work. Singles included the title track Since I Have a Lover, Inwood Hill Park, Talkback, and the Westside Boogie collaboration Spirited Away. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Progressive R&B Album at the 66th Grammy Awards. The feature catalogue runs deep — appearances on J. Cole's KOD album material, Khalid's collaborations, Future's mixtape cycle, Banks's productions, Don Toliver appearances, and a long-running creative dialogue with the LVRN roster around Summer Walker and Ari Lennox. His live touring framework has moved through theater-tier rooms in the early Free 6lack and East Atlanta Love Letter cycles, scaled to mid-sized arena and large theater on the Since I Have a Lover routing, and held festival headline and sub-headline slots across the Afropunk, Rolling Loud, Wireless, OVO Fest, and Lovers and Friends cycles. He runs as one of the cornerstone artists of the LVRN ecosystem in Atlanta and remains based primarily between Atlanta and Los Angeles.

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