At the risk of enraging every struggling musician in North America, Shamir Bailey willingly reveals he hasn’t had an overly rough ride in life.

Reached on his cellphone in New York, the soft-spoken and completely charming 20-year-old notes he’s just got off the plane after a month of shows in Europe. His time overseas was a blur of festival appearances and headlining gigs, those coming on the back of a flurry of gushing press for his debut album, Ratchet, which was released in May.

As he gets ready to focus on North America with a fall tour, Bailey—who performs under the name Shamir—has emerged as one of 2015’s legitimate It Boys. There have been laudatory profiles everywhere from the Guardian to Dummy and raves for a live show that often ends with the singer leaping into the audience to hug fans. Ratchet, meanwhile, has been praised for its mixing and matching of vintage NYC hip-hop, ’80s Motown soul, and Crayola-coloured new wave.

The Las Vegas native admits he’s as surprised as anyone at the way that things have turned out. Before graduating from high school a couple of years back, he was voted classmate most likely to appear in Vogue. Flash forward, and he’s already been in Vogue. If he weren’t so goddamn nice, you could almost resent him for it.

“I’ve only been doing music for two years—it will be two years in October—so all this has come really fast,” Bailey says. “It’s a weird thing that it didn’t happen gradually. I think a lot of musicians work on things for years, so by the time they finally get some recognition it’s been like, ‘This has been a hard time coming.’ ”

With an almost embarrassed laugh, he continues: “With me, I sent an email. I wish I had some good fighting story—that I don’t is something that I kind of regret. Honestly, I thought that me starting with a small label would mean this was a gradual thing, but I can’t control how the world works. But I’ve always been oddly charmed like that. It’s kind of a curse.”

There’s a case to be made that Bailey’s recounting of his own history isn’t totally accurate. As noted, his rise did indeed start with his emailing some bedroom recordings to Big Apple–based indie label Godmode Music. The label’s founder, Nick Sylvester, loved what he heard enough to convince the singer to hop on a plane to New York. Bailey, who at the time was contemplating a stranger-than-fiction move to Rogers, Arkansas, to work on a farm, decided to accept the invitation.

“When he said he wanted to fly me out to New York, I was like, ‘Really?’ ” Bailey recounts. “Three months later I was in New York recording with Nick, but even then I wasn’t expecting too much of it. I was more like, ‘Now I’ve got some proper recordings, which will be even more better to give my family and friends.’ Then I woke up one day and one of my tracks was on Pitchfork.”

Although things didn’t start to really happen until he hooked up with Godmode, Bailey wasn’t a total neophyte when it came to making music. He spent his early teens obsessed with underground punk and new-wave acts like the Slits, GG Allin, and Vivian Girls. That led him to form a lo-fi duo called Anorexia with a high-school friend.

“When I wanted to be a musician, the goal was not to be famous, the goal was not to have my name in lights,” Bailey says. “That’s because the people that I look up to are not necessarily famous—they just make really good music and really good art. And most of them make it themselves in a really super DIY way. That’s all I was going for—to make good, substantial music, and if people could relate, then cool.”

Plenty of people have indeed been able to relate to Ratchet, which plays out like the year’s best old-school urban dance party. Singing in a voice that makes Michael Jackson sound like Johnny Cash, Bailey unleashes his inner NYC B-boy for the throwback jam “On the Regular” and plays golden-throated soul man on the disco burner “Youth”.

Determined not to be pigeonholed, the singer bridges DIY dance-punk and opiate-slurred jazz on “In for the Kill”, drags EDM through country-noir territory on “Head in the Clouds”, and strips things down to nothing but acoustic guitar for the album-closing “KC”.

The roots of Ratchet can be traced back to Bailey messing around in his bedroom. While he describes his Las Vegas suburban upbringing as uneventful, that doesn’t mean he grew up bored. Thanks to his parents, his childhood was an endless smorgasbord of music, with everything from Billie Holiday to Outkast getting played around the house. Later, he’d end up a voraciously curious music consumer, as fascinated with art-pop oddball Regina Spektor as he was with the classic rock of the Who. To this day, one of his most prized possessions is a Velvet Underground jacket of his own making, and his current musical crushes include Mac DeMarco and Solange.

“I didn’t have a charmed life, but I honestly didn’t have a hard one,” Bailey says. “I was pretty much sheltered—it was mostly smooth sailing. A lot of people think that, because I was black and queer and everything, I got bullied a lot. But that really wasn’t the case. Although this sounds very white-bread, there’s not a lot going on in Las Vegas. It’s very suburban, and same old same old, so I ended up having to create my own little world to keep myself entertained. I knew that I wanted to do music ever since I was eight years old. I got my first guitar when I was nine, and was writing songs when I was 12 and 13.”

Seven years later, his bedroom days look like they are long behind him. Try not to be jealous.

Shamir plays Fortune Sound Club on Tuesday (September 29).