Omer Fedi Is The Guitar-Pop Prodigy Behind 24kGoldn And Machine Gun Kelly

By Ethan Shanfeld


Beyond today’s top hits is a 20-year-old guitar prodigy from Tel Aviv named Omer Fedi. The multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter has topped the Billboard charts and worked with pop royalty from Lil Nas X to Machine Gun Kelly. Yet just over four years prior, Fedi moved to Los Angeles without connections to the industry, at a time he may barely speak English language, with one singular goal: “I wanna make my companions the hugest artists in the world,” he tells MTV News, casually pacing around his Bel Air home.


Fedi began playing drums before he might walk. His dad was one of the most accomplished and well-respected drummers in Israel, introducing Fedi to music at a very young age. Inspired by Drake Bell from the mid-aughts Nickelodeon series Drake & Josh, Fedi determined to pick up the guitar at age 10. Immediately after wandering into a nearby CD store and listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, he knew that music was the only way forward. Later, Fedi embraced jazz from listening to Steely Dan. He was enthralled by the incorporation of sophisticated chords and distorted riffs in pop music.


At 16, Fedi moved to the states once his dad sought to expand musical possibilities for himself and his son. Fedi enrolled at Calabasas High School and immediately joined the jazz ensemble, where his teachers were astounded by his technical chops. “He was for now ahead of each person else in terms of his fluency on the musical instrument and his harmonic ability,” says Tod Cooper, a jazz clinician who volunteered at the school. “Nothing got in his way. He might speak by way of the instrument.”


Fedi was a guitar virtuoso; his extraordinary talent would fill school auditoriums for shows normally only attended by performers’ parents. Competing as a high school senior at the 2018 Reno Jazz Festival, Fedi won the single “Outstanding Performer” award in a field of over 9,000 young musicians. The summer immediately after sophomore year, Fedi landed a gig playing guitar at a nearby church, where he met other musicians who invited him to jam sessions. About each year later, one of Fedi’s companions called him with a possibility to meet Sam Hook, a hit songwriter who was looking to collaborate with a guitar player.


“I had never produced or written a song, nevertheless we just began writing with each other, and soon I’d go to his residence day-to-day immediately after school,” Fedi says. Eventually, the pair wrote Ella Mai’s “Naked,” a smooth R&B ballad driven by Fedi’s soulful plucking.


Fedi began spending mornings in classrooms and afternoons at Glenwood Place Recording Studios in Burbank, California. Right after graduating high school, Fedi linked up with English alt-pop star Yungblud. While in one of their sessions, Fedi met former Interscope executive Conor Ambrose, who would later become his manager. “He came in wearing a pink beanie and just sat in the corner of the room,” Ambrose says. “He began playing guitar and each person literally stopped in their tracks, like this is with little effort the most skilled guitarist we’ve ever seen.”


Later that year, a friend from high school invited Fedi to a USC party. There, he met Golden Landis Von Jones, aka 24kGoldn, then a student attempting to prepare it big as a rapper. They exchanged phone numbers and booked a studio session a week later. Fedi and Goldn’s creative partnership began with writing the emo-influenced Iann Dior song, “18.” They continued making music with each other, putting out 24kGoldn singles like the moody “Lot to Lose” and seductive “Games on Your Phone.” Both songs are built around Fedi’s cautiously crafted guitar melodies.


“We routinely begin from scratch,” Fedi says. “Goldn writes the lyrics — he’s one of the fastest writers of all time — and then we write the music and structure it together.” Fedi helped push Goldn to incorporate rock into his fashion with “City of Angels,” which pairs an angsty electric guitar progression with a steady drum machine. The song blew up on TikTok and dominated option radio for months. The duo continued networking with on Goldn’s debut EP, Dropped Outta College, and are currently working on the artist’s first studio album, El Dorado.


In late 2019, Fedi performed as a touring guitarist while in Goldn’s first run with Landon Cube, playing a handful of shows across the nation. Yet, as soon as Goldn’s 2020 headline tour plans were thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic, he and Fedi rented a Airbnb in Hollywood to grind out new songs. Though it was on a night off at Dior’s place whenever they wrote the largest hit of their careers for now — by accident.


“We didn’t even think about making music,” Fedi says. While Goldn and Dior played Call of Duty, Fedi and producer KBeaZy spontaneously began making beats. “I didn’t even have my guitars, so I took Iann’s guitar, plugged it into the computer, and the initial thing I played was the ‘Mood’ guitar riff.” Within five minutes, Fedi and KBeaZy laid down a beat.


“Then Goldn’s sitting on the couch and begins singing, ‘Why you routinely in a mood?’” Fedi says. “He probably didn’t even know he was singing because he was so focused on the game."


Fedi heard something in Goldn’s subconscious hook and pleaded with him to pause the game, get off the couch, and record it. “I was like, ‘Goldn, I won’t be your friend in case you won’t record this,’” Fedi says.


The song came with each other like magic and, soon after its release in July, almost immediately became a smash hit. As of this writing, “Mood” has spent over nine weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, hitting No. 1 on the option charts. It has over 300 million Spotify streams and its music video has over 42 million views on YouTube.


“Mood” is grounded by a shuffling hi-hat beat and elevated by a catchy chorus and crooning verses, however the song is built around its euphoric guitar riff. It’s easy to understand why Fedi’s preference musical group is Red Hot Chili Peppers: Like John Frusciante, he gives the guitar a distinct voice on everything he writes, so that right after just a couple of notes, songs like “Mood” and “City of Angels” are immediately recognizable. “People know that once they work with me, it’s going to be a guitar-based song,” Fedi says. “Nothing can compete with the feeling of live guitar.”


One of Fedi’s objectives is to bring the guitar back to the forefront of pop music. His signature cross-genre sound, evident on songs like The Kid Laroi’s “Go,” seamlessly blends guitar with hip-hop beats. The musician’s most recent creative task to undertake was working on Machine Gun Kelly’s No. 1 album, Tickets To My Downfall, full of nostalgic pop-punk bangers. Fedi produced nine tracks on the deluxe album alongside Blink 182’s Travis Barker, one of his idols.


Recently, Fedi has been hanging out at Diplo’s residence, making music with Dominic Fike, and playing jazz live from Charlie Puth’s Instagram. He’s also been working on Lil Nas X’s debut album and an exhilarating remix of “Mood,” coming out inside of the month. Last November, Fedi was nominated for a Grammy for his work on Ella Mai’s album. The initial song he ever wrote was imagined for music’s highest honor. Yet for a kid whose dream is to be “the best of all time,” this is only the beginning.


“I’m really happy and excited about everything that’s happening right now,” Fedi says. “But I attempt to keep my head down and just make good music.” In several ways, Fedi is the architect beyond pop’s new sound. With a keen ear for crafting hooks and the technical training to execute them, no one is better suited to soundtrack the future.