RAF Camora

The hip-hop artist RAF Camora was born Raphael Ragucci in Switzerland on June 4, 1984, to an Italian mother and an Austrian father. Ragucci spent his formative years in Vienna where he founded a hip-hop group with the Polish Rapatoi. By the time he was 17, he had joined an outfit called the French Connection Crew prior to joining Assault Mystik, a French-speaking rap ensemble. During this period, he collaborated with the rapper Josh Mizu and founded Balkan Express. His debut album was Family Bizz (2003), a joint effort between Assault Mystik and Balkan Express. Ragucci's debut release under his own name was the EP Skandal (2006), later followed by the 2009 album Nächster Stopp Zukunft. In 2010, he took the unusual step of changing his stage name to RAF 3.0, signing to a Vienna-based record label and releasing a self-titled album in 2012 followed by Hoch 2 in 2013. Both albums were commercially successful in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. He then reverted back to his original RAF Camora stage name and released Ghøst in 2016 and Anthrazit in 2017, both of which performed well in the charts and established Ragucci as a notable European hip-hop talent and also as a producer. Although he was already a household name in the German-speaking rap world, RAF Camora really hit his stride in 2019 with the full-length Zenit (2019), which shot straight to the top of the charts in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. An undeniable success, the album quickly went platinum and helped set the stage for yet another chart-topping blockbuster under the title Zukunft (2021), whose title track climbed to Number 4 in Germany.