BOUT2BLOW: Tre.Loaded

Name: Tre.Loaded
Reppin: Memphis
Genre: Rap

Three years ago, Memphis sensation Tre.Loaded was a wanna-be rapper in high school pinching pennies to pay for a video. Three years later, Tre.Loaded is one of the hottest new talents on his way to the top with videos soaring into the millions and three mind-boggling mixtapes doing numbers right out the gate.

“I’m just Memphis. My music sounds like Memphis. If you hear me, you know I’m from Memphis,” Tre.Loaded explains. “I’m authentic. I’m talking about real life, what’s really going on out here. It’s catchy, it’s lyrical and it’s hard.”

Making catchy, lyrical, hardcore music is what Tre was brought up on. The nephew of highly respected Memphis OG Don Trip, he subconsciously soaked up game at a very young age and created a fluid, conversational flow comparable to no other artist out today.

“I been listening to Trip before I could even speak words,” he jokes. “My dad was his road manager and best friend. He been around since my dad been around, since I was knee high. They used to take me to the studio, but I wasn’t never into it.”

Instead of music, Tre.Loaded was fascinated by the streets early on. Born in the historically bloody Orange Mound community and raised in the rough and rugged East Memphis, Tre was the son a teenage mother only 17 years his senior. Three years earlier, she gave birth to Tre’s older sister when she was a baby herself of only 14 years old.

Despite having two toddlers at such a young age, moms made sacrifices, made ends meet and made sure all of her children’s needs were met. When Tre was two years old, she met his stepdad, who “I don’t even call him my stepdad. He’s my dad,” Tre explains.

Together, they provided a stable home for the family. But because baby boy couldn’t resist the allure of the fast life, he started smoking weed at 14 years old. And ma dukes wasn’t having it.

“I got kicked out so many times, I can’t tell you,” he remembers. “I had to get out here and make some money. I couldn’t ask nobody for nothing no more. I had to figure it out.”

Figuring it out meant being brought home by the police at 15 and stealing the car before he was even old enough to drive. So instead of kicking him out of the house, she tried to lock him in. But that didn’t work either.

“They’d sleep, and I’d be sneaking out, stealing the car, getting in high-speed chases,” he describes. “Every time the police brought me to the house, they’d ask her if she wanted them to take me to juvenile (detention center) or keep me.”

His mother couldn’t bear witness to her baby being handcuffed and caged in a cell like an animal, so she never let them take him to jail. “I was just young and dumb,” he confesses.

Even through all the ups and downs, however, he managed to graduate high school. And it was during his senior year that Tre finally found his calling.

To pass the time, he would freestyle with his homies, and they would record the sessions on their phones. Later that night when he would watch the videos they recorded, “I’d be like ‘I sound different from everybody else,’” he realized.

With school being out and the world shut down due to COVID, he had time to sit back and write some lyrics. In 2020, he dropped released the song “Vo Flow” online. It made a little noise, but the fans wanted visuals.

A well-known local videographer charged $250 to shoot a video, but Tre didn’t have enough money to pay for it. “I spent my last,” he admits. “It wasn’t even my last. I only had $150. My uncle gave me the other 100. I was hoping that junt do what it do.”

Not only did it do what it do, but it went crazy. Streams went through the roof, and the fans kept
asking for more. So over the next few years, Tre unloaded a barrage of music videos such as “Use It,” “Really Him” and “Racks In My Account.”

In January 2021, he dropped his debut mixtape This Is Tre Loaded then came back with Made In Memphis in 2022 and his latest banger All About Profit in late 2023. Not even old enough to buy a beer, this is just the beginning for Tre.Loaded. His fanbase grows bigger every day.

“I’m talking about what I live. I talk about my experiences. I’m talking about what I see,” he says. “I like to make different types of music. I want to expand but right now, I want to turn up. I wanna be lit, living life, making money. I’m only 20, and I got a lot more to come.”