Ali Gatie is an Iraqi–Canadian rapper, singer and songwriter. His 2019 song "It's You" charted worldwide, charting on the US Billboard Hot 100[1] and reaching the top 40 in Australia, Canada, Ireland and Sweden and the top 10 in New Zealand and in Germany.
Ali Gatie was born to Iraqi parents in Yemen in 1997. His family moved to Abu Dhabi before settling in Mississauga, Ontario. He grew up listening to Ed Sheeran, J. Cole and Frank Ocean, who influenced his music.
Gatie started pursuing a music career at the age of 18 and started to record in 2016. This decision later caused him to drop out of university.[2] In 2017, he won an online RhymeStars competition hosted by Joe Budden. After releasing a string of singles in 2018, he was signed by Warner Records.[3] The song "Moonlight" would turn out to be his first commercial success, garnering nearly 14 million views on YouTube. However, the release of "It's You" in June 2019 would become his mainstream breakthrough;[4] an "explosive streaming story," as of December 2019, it had exceeded 650 million streams.[5][6] On 8 November 2019, Gatie released his first album, You. A 12-minute film accompanied the release, which included seven new songs.[7] Gatie's snippet of his next single "What If I Told You That I Love You," released on the video-sharing social networking app TikTok, went viral, amassing over 20 million engagements. Released in January 2020, the single was described by Rolling Stone as "a breezy, springtime-fresh midtempo track" and peaked at number 36 on Billboard's Hot Canadian Digital Song Sales Chart. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.