Meet Jared Higgins, The Man Behind the Performance.

There was always something a little haunted in the way Juice WRLD moved through the world—like he was already somewhere else, whispering back to us from a distance we couldn’t yet name.

I never saw Juice WRLD as a genre. He was a sign. A consistent pattern. A living archive of what it means to hurt in public and still find meaning in the chaos. But more than that, he was. And Jared felt like someone I always remembered. Someone who moved through the world like a dreamer with too much awareness. He didn’t just make music—he made shelters. Spaces where honesty wasn’t a liability, it was a language. He wasn’t clean-cut or curated. He was chaos with a heartbeat. Trained in classical music by a mother who banned rap, and raised in a digital culture that taught boys to medicate instead of cry. And yet, somehow, he found a frequency that held both—the formality of piano, the rage of suffering, the ache of loving fully, presently, without trying to avoid it. That contradiction? That was his gift.

Born Jarad Anthony Higgins on December 2, 1998, in the outer rings of Chicago, Jared was a kid raised on contradictions: He was one of those rare artists who blurred the line between impulse and intention. He came up fast—rising from raw freestyles and unfiltered emotion—and somehow managed to turn vulnerability into momentum that resonated widely. Jared grew up immersed in a diverse musical landscape that shaped his sound. From early influences like rock and emo bands such as Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance to rap legends like Lil Wayne and Future, Juice absorbed it all and filtered these elements into something distinctly his own.

Jared didn’t make music so much as leak feeling. His freestyles were exorcisms. His hooks were soft detonations. You could hear the post-punk Midwest in his voice—the long winters, the empty stairwells, the aching for escape. His breakout moment, “Lucid Dreams,” was more than a hit—it was a transmission from inside the wreckage, built off a Sting sample and Jared’s own open vein. He had this way of stitching heartbreak into melody without ever once sounding performative. He meant it. All of it. Even the throwaways felt lived in. His music didn’t chase perfection; it demanded presence. Even when his verses felt loose or unfinished, the emotional truth behind them was complete. He never polished away the rough edges, and that rawness made his work feel more human and accessible.

Juice’s interests extended beyond music too. He was known for his love of video games, anime, and skate culture—parts of his personality that seeped into his creative process and helped him connect with a generation navigating their own complexities. His openness about mental health struggles, substance use, and heartbreak made him feel less like a distant star and more like someone grappling alongside his listeners. To me, Juice was continuously evolving. That perpetual state of becoming was part of his appeal. In embracing his imperfections and inconsistencies, he gave people permission to be exactly where they are, messy and all. It’s that honesty that keeps his music alive beyond the charts—a soundtrack for anyone still figuring things out.

Behind the Juice WRLD performance was Jared: anime lover, Mortal Kombat nerd, obsessed with skate culture and love like it was something mythic. He was writing poetry in the margins of notebooks, naming demons in lowercase, and turning panic attacks into top-charting tracks. Goodbye & Good Riddance wasn't an album, it was a confession scrawled in text message drafts. Death Race for Love was his digital heartbreak saga, scored like a video game you can’t win. And yet, even as the lights got brighter and the stages got bigger, the boy never left the booth. He recorded constantly. Lived in headphones. Laughed big. Cried soft.

Jared wasn’t trying to be an icon. He was just trying to be heard before the noise took over. He gave voice to a generation that was numbed out and overexposed, but still craving something real. He didn’t escape his pain—but he did translate it, and that matters. He left us sonic diary entries and dream fragments to hold onto. He made feeling cool again. Juice matters because he made feeling look like power. He made boys weep and girls rage and all of us reconsider what strength really sounds like. He didn’t want to live forever—but he wanted the music to. And it does.

“Woah (Mind in Awe)” sits in that gray area between emotional detachment and quiet urgency. It’s not polished to feel cinematic or overdrawn—instead, it lets the weight of the moment speak through tone and pacing. The production is minimal but intentional, built around swirling synths and a slightly off-kilter rhythm that feels like it's floating just behind real time. There's a suspended quality to the beat, like it’s meant to drift rather than drive.

Juice WRLD approaches the track with his signature edge that fits his delivery, that feels present without overstatement. It’s raw but not loud about it. X, on the other hand, cuts through with a flatter, more grounded tone, providing a sharp edge to Juice’s stability. There’s no clash—just contrast. The balance between them is subtle but powerful. You get the sense they’re not trying to match each other; they’re just existing side by side in the same unsettled space.

The song emphasizes negative space, liminality, the moment between moments. The mental static that doesn’t need to be explained. Instead of overreaching for meaning, the track leans into atmosphere. It doesn’t build toward a climax or resolution. It holds itself steady and lets you sit with it. There’s something honest in that restraint. It's a short, open-ended reflection—more feeling than statement, more presence than performance. And in that, it holds space for a kind of quiet resonance. Not a moment of awe in the loud sense, but in the way your brain gets still for a second when something just barely brushes the truth.