The Groundbreakers Issue with Sean O’Malley, Matt Zingler and Tatu Panda

Welcome to the Groundbreakers Issue! This time around we’re turning our eye towards people who have upturned the apple cart in one way or another, paving the way for an exciting new future.

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Sean O’Malley

You may not know Sean O’Malley’s name, but you would sure as hell know it if you were on the business end of one of his strikes. “Suga” Sean has ridden a string of victories to the very top of the Bantamweight division of the UFC. Chuck Mindenhall interviewed the swaggy fighter for our cover story, touching on topics including his meteoric rise up the ranks of the UFC.

“It’s inevitable that I’m going to be a world champion,” O’Malley says. “You can go back and watch the interviews during that Contender Series five years ago. I was saying everything that’s pretty much been happening. I’m going to go out, create a highlight reel, and just keep building. The ultimate goal is to be the pay-per-view king.”

Read the full article here! 

Matt Zingler

You may not know Matt Zingler’s name, but you sure as hell know his work. Zingler is one of the co-founders of Rolling Loud, the world’s largest hip-hop festival. The Rolling Loud team works tirelessly all year long to curate unforgettable lineups and conjure new installations to make each iteration of the festival the best one yet.

“A festival provides you an opportunity to meet like-minded people who enjoy music you enjoy,” Zingler says when asked what he hopes first time attendees of Rolling Loud take away from the experience. “I think there’s a great value to bringing everybody together every year. You could really walk away from Rolling Loud with some amazing friends and build amazing experiences for yourself aside from just seeing the music. What you get out of it is being there and being part of an amazing movement while seeing artists you might never get to see again.”

Read the full article here!

Tatu Panda

You may not know Tatu Panda’s name, but you sure as hell have seen his handiwork. Panda’s intricate black-and-grey realism tattoos can be seen on the skin of some of the world’s most famous folks, from Bad Bunny to Lil Uzi Vert to Jake Paul. Not too shabby for someone who started their career at 14 working out of a flea market, right?

“I don’t know what this is like anywhere else, but in Miami there’s a handful of these flea markets, and there was actually this whole flea market tattoo culture,” Panda tells our writer, Nick Fierro. “You could buy anything in there—bootleg DVDs, weed, grills, fake gold. Legal, illegal, it was all there inside these flea markets, so a lot of tattoo shops popped up. I was tattooing there when I was 15. Legitimately, I had a job, but I had to tell people that I was 22 and I’d been tattooing for four years. I was tattooing flames, dice, money bags. That was the flea market special. you could come in for a $300 tap-out session and leave with a whole sleeve.”

Read the full article here!

Remi Wolf

Remi Wolf is living her life in full color. It was during the early days of the pandemic when Wolf became a household name as her funky pop song “Photo ID” went viral on TikTok. From there everything snowballed in a hurry, Wolf explains to our writer Sophia Tan, but make no mistake, she is not just a flash in the pan.

“Since I was little, I was obsessed with art,” Wolf says. “It started out as me drawing and painting all the time when I was in preschool. I would do all these performances for my parents in my backyard where I would sing or do dance stuff. I feel like harmonies are really my first live. I think that’s because they’ve been part of my life since I was literally 9 years old.”

Jelly Roll

Long before he was releasing hit after hit as Jelly Roll, Jason DeFord was living on the south side of Nashville living with his family of “super normal people.” One constant throughout his childhood was music. His parents and siblings were always listening to different types of music, and young Jelly Roll absorbed it all, as you can tell by listening to his genre-bending music.

“Every time I write a song, I’m thinking about how music made my mother feel and how I watched it make her feel,” he says. “I think about how music made me feel at my darkest. There’s a quote that says, ‘Music is what feelings sound like.’ To me, that’s the importance of music.”

Read the full article here! 

Our Groundbreakers issue is absolutely packed with profiles like the ones above. You’ll also find interviews with Arcángel, New Years Day, Vic Blends, Royal & The Serpent and much more. Pick up your copy of The Groundbreakers Issue here. And if you want to make sure to never miss an issue of Inked, subscribe here.