Maximilian Johnson, better known by his stage name Lil Smaller, is a rapper, producer and content creator. Before starting out in music, Max ran a popular meme page on Instagram. Going by savagerealms.daughter, named after another former meme page turned musician SavageRealm, he posted original content which is now mostly lost to time.

Max released his first song as Lil Smaller on December 10, 2017, with “Gucci in the Snow.” The song received positive feedback from his audience which led him to keep creating. Following it up a few months later on March 14, 2018, Max released “Kryptonite” featuring DBangz, which instantly started to become popular within the meme rap community. Not even a month later he dropped “Ridin In My John Deere.” Max initially started Lil Smaller as a meme rap project, but with the release of his final meme rap song “In The Country” featuring 904TEZZO on June 19, 2018, Max took the Lil Smaller project into a more serious direction.

On October 17, 2018, Max released the song “Friday Night.” This song would be different then anything he had released prior as it wasn’t a joke song. After receiving positive reception for the track, Max continued to release serious music, soon after following up “Friday Night” with the release of “Life” on November 29, 2018.

After a brief hiatus, on March 29, 2019, Lil Smaller released his first EP, Conflicted. The project received very positive feedback among fans and featured popular songs like “Outta Touch” and “Get the Bag and Disappear.” featuring Yung Tenet.

Smaller continued to release music throughout 2019, eventually releasing his soon to be biggest song “Memories” on August 25, 2019. The song would outperform anything Smaller has released to this point, going on to receive over a million streams on Spotify alone. He followed it up a month later with the release of “My Zone,” which also performed well.

Max ended off 2019 with the release of his second and final EP, Disarray, on December 8, 2019. Just like Conflicted, this project would instantly resonate with fans and become a cult classic amongst his community.

Going into 2020, Max would continue to drop music, with singles like “Fly Away,” “No Goodbyes” and “30,000 Feet Above.”

From this point onward, Smaller’s output would slow down drastically, only releasing two songs in 2021, those being “No End” and “Why Do I Try.” 2022 would be the same with only one release, that being “Through the Lense.” Unknowingly to fans, this would be Lil Smaller’s final release, with the only thing coming after being “Eternity” in 2024, an old song recorded in 2019.

Max has since stepped away from the Lil Smaller project, though never officially retiring it. He has since released an ambient album titled of sorts under a new name, shintai. He also uploads YouTube videos as three finger drag, マックス and real life show, where he has seen varying success.