On October 9, 2024, Willie James Ray III retired the name he had used for nearly a decade and introduced a new one. Lil Will was done. Willie Noir Obscura was the name attached to Mastery, his eighth studio album, which dropped the same day. The timing was not accidental. October 9 is his birthday, and he has used it as a release date for much of his career. The rebrand came with something that put it in concrete terms: 13 official music videos, one for every track on the album, all produced in-house by Ray himself using AI video generation tools alongside his existing editing workflow.
For an independent artist operating without major label infrastructure, that visual output is a significant production undertaking. Most independent releases get one video, maybe two. Thirteen in a single campaign represents the kind of effort that requires either a large team or someone who has spent years building the technical skills to work largely alone. Ray is the latter.
A Catalog Ten Years in the Making
Ray was born October 9, 1991, in Centreville, Illinois, and grew up in Cahokia, a city in the Metro East area just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. On his 25th birthday in 2016, he released his debut EP, “The World Is Mines,” with singles including “Heaven or Hell” and “Day 1s” featuring Kevo. A full-length album, “Free World,” followed the same year with the single “Choices” featuring Echo and production from DJ Radiohead Beats and Hurricane Beatz.
The discography expanded steadily from there. His second album, “Eskimo Lifestyle,” arrived January 1, 2019, with production from G-Money, Luh Charlez, and Hurricane Beatz, and features from Timo and Kevo. A third album, “I Am,” followed that October 9. “Born To Hustle” came in June 2020. Then “Recreated” that July 2021, an 18-track project with features from Echo and Timo. By March 2023, he released his sixth album, “Prod By Lil Will,” in which he wrote and produced all 20 instrumentals himself. That record also included vocal features from two of his children, Rayinna Ray and Willie James Ray IV.
The seventh album, “Rothschild Dreams,” landed October 9, 2023. The company reports it generated millions of streams following its release. Mastery came the next October, and by 2026, Ray had released his ninth album, “Forever,” a 14-track project. According to the company, the cumulative catalog now spans more than 400 released songs and billions of streams across platforms.
The Business of Dream Team Empire
Dream Team Empire is Ray’s independent company. It functions as the release vehicle for his music and as the production house for his video work, with his YouTube channel operating under the Dream Team Empire Films banner. The company also runs an online merchandise line, and Ray offers audio engineering services commercially, with pricing for mixing and mastering work listed on his website. He works across Pro Tools, FL Studio, and Logic Pro for recording and production, and uses Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut for video editing.
The pattern across his catalog reflects a consistent preference for handling as much as possible himself. The move from working with outside producers on his early records to writing all 20 instrumentals on Prod By Lil Will, then using AI generation tools to produce a full suite of visuals for Mastery, follows the same thread. The tools change; the approach does not.
Family as a Thread Through the Work
Ray has brought his children into his discography across multiple projects. Rayinna Ray and Willie James Ray IV both appear on Prod By Lil Will, and Willie James Ray IV is featured on the Mastery single “Everybody Hustle.” They appear in the credits the same way any other featured artist would, without being positioned as a marketing angle. The consistency of their appearances across separate releases suggests it is simply part of how he works.
His broader circle of collaborators has also stayed relatively stable across albums, including Kevo, Echo, Timo, 2Cupz, Og Papi, G-Money, Luh Charlez, and Speed on the Track, among others. The recurring names point to a working network built over time rather than one-off guest arrangements.
Where Things Stand
His full catalog is available on streaming platforms including Spotify, where his releases appear under both the Lil Will and Willie Noir Obscura pages. New music video content continues to surface on the Dream Team Empire Films YouTube channel, with recent releases including “Elevation,” “The Biggest,” and the title track from Forever.
The rebrand to Willie Noir Obscura did not change the underlying practice. Ray still records, engineers, and distributes his own music, directs and edits his own visuals, and operates on his own release schedule out of the Greater St. Louis area. What the name marks, more than anything else, is a decade of accumulated skills and output. The catalog makes that case before anything else does.