This rapper’s song went viral before it was even available to stream. The full version is out now.

Paul Russell was mini-golfing with friends when his phone started buzzing. He saw a TikTok he posted earlier was performing well. He went about his day. But in his pocket, his phone continued to buzz.

Chances are, if you’re active on TikTok, you’ve interacted with his content before — even if you didn’t realize it. That’s because Russell, 25, is the singer, rapper, and songwriter behind one of the platform’s unofficial songs of the summer: “Lil Boo Thang.”

“Lil Boo Thang,” a breezy pop hip-hop track that samples the instrumental from “Best of My Love” by the Emotions, has been used in more than 50,000 TikTok posts, including some with millions of views.

The California artist’s original video — posted June 28 — featuring a snippet of the song has earned him more than 5 million views and a record deal. That was all before he’d even finished writing it.

As of Friday, “Lil Boo Thang” is out in full across music streaming platforms. It marks Russell’s debut under Arista Records, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment with which he signed a contract earlier this month. He resigned from his desk job as a senior business strategist for a capital markets and software company days later.

He says he’s still catching his breath.

“I had absolutely no indication the song would be as big as it is now,” Russell said. “I went to bed with 30,000 followers and woke up with 100,000.”

Russell grew up in Dallas, but now lives in Los Angeles. As a boy, he gravitated toward making music.

He describes his sound as “cookout music” — songs for having a good time.

“I imagine myself with a bunch of my friends and try to make something we’d all sing along to,” he said. “Lately, that’s been going into the funk and soul direction. But I do some pop, too.”

He made an album for a high school English project. While studying labor relations at Cornell University, he played the ukulele and would book gigs at cafés and pizza shops.

“At the time I understood it was an escape, an outlet,” he said. “But over time, I got more serious.”

Russell headed to California for a college internship.

“I was bored on the weekends with friends performing at shows that I’d go to,” he said. “The people loved their music. It was like the soundtrack of their lives. It felt really meaningful to me. So I decided to look at it more seriously.”

After he graduated in 2019, Russell moved to L.A. He held a corporate job during the day. But by 2020, he was beginning to establish a presence on TikTok.

Russell has used TikTok as a way to promote his music and try out new things for an audience.

Besides original songs, he also makes videos of himself adding verses to already existing pop songs, like Billie Eilish’s “my future.”

“A big benefit of TikTok for me has been getting real-time feedback,” Russell said. “It’s helped me develop what my sound is and I can also see what people like.”

This isn’t an unusual strategy. West Philly’s own Armani White premiered a snippet of his viral song, “BILLIE EILISH.” on TikTok months before releasing a full version. Last weekend, Armani performed the song with its namesake.

As it turns out, Russell was promoting an entirely different song when he posted “Lil Boo Thang” as a way to break up his feed.

“It was just a ‘I need something else to post so people don’t get annoyed’ thing,” Russell said.

He’s had brushes with virality before. In 2020, he laid a verse atop “I Won’t Say (I’m In Love)” from Disney’s Hercules, which earned more than half a million likes. But, he says, “Lil Boo Thang” is proving to be his biggest success yet.

Russell thought his lucky streak on TikTok happened about a month ago when one of his videos broke a million views. “I thought to myself, ‘you get your one moment and that’s it,’ ” he said. “But then this happened.”

Within hours of Russell posting a snippet of “Lil Boo Thang” on TikTok, users began pleading for the full version. In a reply video, Russell posted a skit about how the demand for a full track had him “fearing for his life.” It got more than 40,000 likes within a week.

According to Know Your Meme, the song has become a viral soundtrack for others’ posts, ranging in content from dancing, to DIY and interior decorating. One has a rabbit dancing to the song. Several of those videos have also gone viral themselves, only adding to the song’s reach.

It’s come to the point where a friend will send Russell an unrelated TikTok and he’ll focus on its content, only to realize his song is playing in the background.

“I still don’t really grasp it,” he said. “But now, when I perform a show, it’s a lot more packed and a lot of people are listening to my older work and know the lyrics to my other songs. It’s such a crazy feeling.”