Artist profile ·
WHO IS A3THA
A3ThaGritKing takes what Tulsa put him through, from the streets to personal loss, and bends it into records built for forward motion.
Grit is more than a word in A3ThaGritKing’s name. For the Tulsa artist, it’s the code running under everything he’s building.
“Grit means hustle. It means motivation. It means dedication,” he told FVTV. It also means making something out of nothing and finding a way forward when nobody drew you a map.
The definition explains the name and the music. A3ThaGritKing makes street records, motivational joints, club-ready tracks and songs with drill energy, and he refuses to get boxed into one sound. His catalog moves with his life. Some records carry the weight of the Tulsa streets, while others lean into relationships, travel, ambition and the quiet that settles in once the noise dies down.
The through line is perspective. A3 is documenting what it takes to survive where he comes from while he builds toward something bigger.
Tulsa showed him the price tag early
Tulsa sits at the center of who A3ThaGritKing is. He describes the city as a place that lit a fire under him and made him pay attention.
He watched talented people lose time, lose opportunities and sometimes lose their freedom before their potential ever got a chance to bloom. Growing up around that taught him to study how things end up. He had to decide whether he’d build a future for himself or let the streets pick one for him.
A3 says he was outside from a young age and later served a prison sentence as a young adult. He brings that history up as context, and it never reads like set dressing. It shaped how he thinks about authenticity, accountability and the gap between claiming a lifestyle and living with what comes after it.
The tension runs all through his pen. His music doesn’t act like the past vanished. It shows an artist trying to flip those experiences into momentum, ownership and a more deliberate life.
Why he called it PricelessArt
A3ThaGritKing calls PricelessArt his first official album. The title rests on one simple belief: nobody else can copy the life behind the music.
The project pulls from his emotions, relationships, family, street experience, ambition and a growing interest in building wealth. A3 wants listeners close enough to the story that it feels like he’s talking to them face to face.
The “priceless” part is the perspective, and it belongs to him alone, whatever the production numbers, streams or outside approval say.
PricelessArt also marks a transition. A3 still makes music rooted in the streets, but his goals have grown past survival. The long game is turning experience into something he can own, grow and eventually hand down.
The starter pack
A3 points new listeners to a handful of songs, including “Southern Flow,” “Pay The Cost,” “Ain’t Got Time” and “Back 2 the Trap.” He’s also been pushing newer records like “Great Man” and “Goku.”
“Southern Flow” might be the cleanest intro to who he is. The record carries his original delivery and the North Tulsa grit he wants people to recognize, and it reps an Oklahoma rap style that gets slept on whenever national conversations shrink Southern music down to a few big markets. RTB produced it and Eezy engineered it.
“Back 2 the Trap,” featuring BossMade and engineered by Eezy, paints a wider picture of Oklahoma life. A3 ties the record to streets, parties, lakes, bars, bonfires and that mix of city and country culture outsiders might never connect to Tulsa. He says the song came together naturally in the studio. When a verse wasn’t finished, he didn’t force it. He walked away, came back the next morning and recorded once the writing felt right.
Peep the process there. Grit doesn’t always mean rushing. Sometimes it means sitting with the work until it matches the idea in your head.
“Pay The Cost” hits heavier
“Pay The Cost” comes from a darker place. A3 says he made the record after one of his cousins was killed, and the song became a way to keep his cousin’s memory alive while showing a harder, more personal side of himself.
The title fits the bigger theme of his career too. Independent artists pay in money, time, patience and missed opportunities long before anybody sees a finished video or hears a polished record. In his interview, A3 stressed that listeners see the result and rarely see what got spent behind it. The idea runs through the whole conversation: sacrifice bankrolls the music long before attention pays anything back. Eezy engineered “Pay The Cost,” too.
Late Night Drive rolls the windows down
His range really comes through on Late Night Drive, a four-song project built for nighttime rides and relationship situations.
The project covers travel, romance, artist life and the pressure, good and bad, that comes with his lifestyle. It gives him room to step back from the hardest edges of his catalog while keeping the experiences that shaped him in the passenger seat.
Range is a big deal here, since A3 sees versatility as part of his identity. Street music might be the foundation, and he’s free to build whatever he wants on top of it.
Moving past survival mode
The biggest part of A3ThaGritKing’s story might be where he’s trying to go next. His music reflects the streets, and his stated goals point toward business, bigger collaborations and wider reach. He wants to build city by city, with no plan to sit around waiting on one viral moment to change everything. It fits the way he defines grit: stay dedicated, use what’s in front of you and keep cutting a path when nobody hands you one.
A3ThaGritKing is still growing his audience. What makes him worth watching is that the catalog already shows a distinct point of view, a strong Tulsa identity and a willingness to make records for more than one mood.
For first-timers, start with “Southern Flow” for the core sound, “Back 2 the Trap” for the Oklahoma backdrop and “Pay The Cost” for the personal weight behind the music. Then slide into PricelessArt for the full picture.
A3ThaGritKing is trying to turn survival into ownership and experience into art nobody can bootleg. To him, that’s what makes it priceless.