Navਨੈਵ

Nav (born Navraj Singh Goraya on 3 November 1989) is a Punjabi Canadian rapper, singer and record producer from Toronto's Rexdale neighbourhood. Raised in a Punjabi Sikh immigrant family, he went from producing for Drake to topping the Billboard 200 twice, becoming one of the most successful South Asian artists in North American hip hop.

A Rexdale childhood with a studio dream

Navraj Singh Goraya was born in Toronto on 3 November 1989 and raised in Rexdale, a working class neighbourhood in the city's north west, in a Punjabi Sikh immigrant family from Punjab, India. His mother worked in computer manufacturing and his father drove a forklift. Music entered his life through family: an uncle who had been a popular Punjabi singer back in India took the boy to a recording studio for the first time, and the machines fascinated him. He studied audio production and engineering at the Metalworks Institute in Mississauga, graduating in 2010 with a diploma and a plan to make records rather than simply admire them.

From the producer's chair to SoundCloud

Nav's first big credit came behind the desk: in 2015 he co-produced Back to Back, Drake's famous diss track, a calling card few young producers anywhere could match. Take Me Simple also reached the ears of Drake's team and was played on Drake's OVO Sound Radio in January 2016. At the same time he was building his own voice on SoundCloud, where songs such as Take Me Simple and, in 2016, Myself began to travel. Myself took off after reality star Kylie Jenner was filmed singing along to it, and the same year Nav featured on and solely produced Travis Scott's Beibs in the Trap, which went double platinum. The quiet producer from Rexdale was suddenly an artist the whole industry was watching.

Signing with XO and topping the charts

In early 2017 Nav signed to XO, the Toronto label founded by the Weeknd, and to Republic Records. His self-titled debut mixtape, with the Weeknd featuring on Some Way, arrived that February, followed by Perfect Timing, a joint mixtape with producer Metro Boomin. His debut studio album, Reckless, followed in 2018. Then came the chart peaks: Bad Habits in 2019 and Good Intentions in 2020 both debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, the main American album chart. An expanded deluxe edition of Good Intentions, subtitled Brown Boy 2, followed within days and helped push the album back to the top of the charts. His single Turks, with Gunna and Travis Scott, reached number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, while his feature on Internet Money's Lemonade climbed to number six. He closed out 2020 with Emergency Tsunami, a collaborative tape with producer Wheezy. Later albums Demons Protected by Angels, which debuted at number two in 2022, and OMW2 Rexdale, in 2025, kept him at the top end of the charts, and in 2023 he appeared on Calling, recorded with Metro Boomin and Swae Lee for the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack.

What does Nav's success mean for Punjabi Canada?

Nav records under the nickname Brown Boy, a name he turned from a taunt into a banner, and his fifth album is titled after Rexdale itself, the neighbourhood that raised him. His rise belongs to a longer Punjabi Canadian music story that runs from pioneers such as Bohemia, the California-based rapper who built Punjabi rap a decade earlier, to the Toronto generation Nav leads. Juno Award nominations, including breakthrough artist of the year in 2018, recognised at home what the American charts already showed: a forklift driver's son from Rexdale had become one of the signature sounds of modern hip hop, without hiding where he came from.

The sound and the stance

Nav's music pairs melodic, Auto-Tuned sing-rap with spacious trap production, a sound AllMusic describes as riding hypnotic beats with a wavy flow. He produces much of his own work, which keeps his fingerprints on every stage of a record. On stage and in interviews he is soft-spoken about the journey, but the facts speak plainly: two number one albums in the United States, billions of streams, and a generation of young Punjabi Canadians who can point to a global star who grew up on streets like theirs.