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LISTEN IF YOU LIKE: DRUM & BASS, DANCEHALL, AND NICKI MINAJ. The sonic equivalent of a bold red lip, a Jessicunt set makes its mark smudged across sweaty necks, salted rims, and the soggy end of a blunt passed from hand-to-lips-to-hand. Jessica Udeh, a music-obsessed first-generation Nigerian in Maryland, became Jessicunt by “acting cunty in a group chat.”

A proud barb, semi-music snob, and world traveler, Jessicunt is assertive, but not confrontational, confident, but not cocky, and forward without coming on too strong. Operating in the in-between, Jessicunt converges culture through her exploration of diasporic dance music. Jessicunt’s early years were populated with Afrobeats, Highlife, and Dancehall. As her musical sensibilities ventured outside her home, she dove into Rap and Hip-Hop history, filling the gaps between her Nigerian and American identity.

Driven by percussive rhythms and powerful vocals, Jessicunt’s sound is strong and heady, becoming soft and malleable in the movement of the crowd. Her crowds are charged with energy unbridled. Reverberating against a bass that leaves ear-drums buzzing, Jessicunt builds harmony through the chaos. Though introverted in her own right, Jessicunt is emboldened behind the booth, fortified by the wall of sound she builds and scales with grace.

To her, music has been a means of strengthening identity and building freer ways of being. With early inspirations like M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, Kelis, and Venus X, Jessicunt’s main objective is to empower. In doing so, she expands the listener’s ears to new sounds and cultural pockets within the scene. Her own practice is fueled by travel, picking up sounds like Amapiano from South Africa, and the resurgence of drum & bass from the heart of London’s diasporic DJs. Her music remixes tradition and predicts trends to create a work that operates in its own time.

Jessicunt invites listeners to be bold, adventurous, and find a piece of themselves in each new sound.

Check out Jessicunt's exclusive mix and interview with office below.

Can you walk me through this mix, what were you feeling when you put it together? What are some of your favorite tracks?

I was feeling ANXIOUS AS FUCK. I was in London battling the birthday blues as well as general imposter syndrome and after several days at the studio, I still didn’t have a mix. After several hours at my homies crib, because I was tired of wasting my money, I STILL didn’t have a mix. It wasn’t until I got back to where I was staying after all the failed attempts that I sat down and thought “okay. what is this going to give?” I knew that when I listened back to this I wanted to feel like I was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A timeless, borderless, hair-raising, sonic experience. From there I was able to weave together a pool of tracks I loved but it wasn’t until I got on the plane leaving London that I was able to record this mix. I was two cups of wine in with no regard for my seat neighbor and that’s when I dragged. I have more so a favorite section than individual tracks, and that’s the part from “INDIAN BOOKSHELF RIDDIM” all the way to “Punani (BAE BAE Edit)” at that moment I was living my fullest dancehall queen dreams.

Where do you find new music?

Anywhere really, you just have to be ready for a very long wormhole/rabbit hole, either of the holes. Depending on the genre, I will use certain platforms. If I'm looking for a very good hidden gem of a dub, I'm going to YouTube. For house deep cuts, I'm going to YouTube or even fucking Reddit. Places where the nerds gather are where the bops are, usually. For edits, I love Bandcamp and SoundCloud. I usually start with artists that I'm already listening to, and maybe people that they've worked with or featured because they tend to work within a similar world, or maybe one that's even better that they're trying to invite their fans into. But I love a good SoundCloud deep dive. You start with one track, go to the related tracks, go from the related tracks to the artists of the related tracks, go from the artists and the related tracks to the artists that they've collaborated with. And so on and so forth. There are just so many talented people out there, and you have to look past the numbers. So many of the greatest tracks have pretty much no plays. And a good DJ is not going to pass up a track because no one's salivating at the mouth over it in the comments, you know. So yeah, just I go through very extensive deep dives.

What makes your ears perk up, what makes you want to use something?

I will say, for playing out, I look for things that are percussion-heavy, or tracks that I can turn into something percussion-heavy, like the Rihanna track in this mix, “Woo” that's not very fast-paced. It is high-energy, but it's not fast-paced. It's not something somebody can shake their butt and break their back to but you throw those drums over it, and it's a whole different vibe now. So I think for playing things out, I look for  strong elements of percussion, or the opportunity to overlay another strong element of percussion. As far as what might go in a mix, I think the energy of a live set versus a mix can be quite different. For mixes I use anything that I can get into a groove with, even if it's slow. I love to find a good pocket for a mix. I know that you're not always going to be in a rambunctious setting, maybe you're at home, maybe you're commuting, I like tracks sound hypnotizing, almost monotonous, then maybe there's a break and I can slip a groove in, but not as out right, in your face as a track that I would play in a party.

Deep cuts versus fan favorites, where do you fall?

Okay, deep cuts versus fan favorites…I am a deep cut girl I can't lie. I find that I have a pattern of playing a bunch of deep cuts then introducing a fan favorite just for rewarding you for literally making it through that hell. Especially if you don't know any of the songs that I'm playing, I'm sure that's so annoying, but I usually know when it's time to introduce a quick popular song.

What’s your favorite thing to see in a crowd?

I love a good rave girl, main character moment. When there's someone in the middle of the dance floor or maybe off to the side, and they're just getting their life, they may not even be dancing with anybody, but you can tell the music is literally taking over every fiber of their being. That's what I love to see. I also love to see people making out in the club because that would literally never be me, too many germs. But I love that for you guys. I'm living vicariously. Ultimately, just seeing people being their full, unfiltered selves, within reason. I love to see people at the height of their personalities. Like, if you're that friend who's kind of anti and it's just gonna be like, off to the side being anti, I kind of love to see that, but times a billion. If you're the social butterfly friend, who gets drunk and then goes and makes an entire new group of friends. I love to see that too. The only thing I really hate to see in the club is people making other people uncomfortable. People making people feel generally unsafe. I also hate name-dropping in the club and people taking pictures of everything they do. I personally don't care for certain vices. But at this point, we should not be photographing every time we see somebody take a bump or like do some K. Like it's not for the finsta every time, you know. I love to see authenticity. I hate to see discomfort, overzealousness.

So what did you listen to growing up?

Growing up, I listened to a lot of Soukous music, Highlife, Afrobeat, Afro beats– because there are people like Fela, but then there’s people like Wizkid and Burna Boy. I also listened to Dancehall. I was very diaspora-focused, because, my parents came over relatively young, so they were trying, I believe, to hold on to certain elements of their culture. Because of assimilation, there were a few things that would slip through, like my father was obsessed with Michael Jackson, both of my parents actually. So we were listening to Afrobeat and dancehall and all these things. And then occasionally other things would slip in like "Funkytown" I forget who sings it, but it's like, “why don't you take me to Funkytown,” stuff like that. It was very much immigrant, but that's also trying to assimilate in a way, so it was weird. Even in the car with the radio, my mom, would maybe listen to the radio the first 10 seconds we’re in the car, but then she would just put in a CD that we had heard a billion times.

It wasn't until fifth grade for Christmas, I got an mp3 player. I had begged and begged and begged and I got it. My brother's computer was the only computer I had access to in the house. So I just connected it, and downloaded whatever I could before I could get caught. It was like Jay Z's second Blueprint, and a bunch of Lil Wayne. That's how I got into Lil Kim and Biggie. I took it way, way back, and started researching. And you know, from that moment, I kinda was able to identify more with what I was hearing outside, I was able to connect with kids because I could listen to what they're hearing, I could hear what they're listening to. And at a point, I lived in Langley Park, which was predominantly African and Latin immigrants. So then, if it wasn't Afrobeat, and it wasn't Hip Hop, it was Reggaeton. So my sonic world started to kind of cement itself from that point. That coupled with like, the pop and the random funk and all these things that my parents would slide in. So it was weird, I heard so much from a young age. But certain things didn't get introduced until later.

Ok–can you explain the Afrobeat, Afrobeats distinction? I feel like so many people don’t know that and just use them interchangeably.

So Afrobeat is more so an overarching genre and identity that encompasses Western & Central African music, jazz, highlife and funk. The more popular regions are Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon. This sound is also much older than Afrobeats and its most notable pioneer is Fela Kuti. Now - Afrobeats is an umbrella term for contemporary West African popular music. So when you hear Afrobeat, think Fela Kuti and Manu Dibango. When you hear Afrobeats, think WizKid and Davido.

What are you listening to now?

Yeah, fast forward till now, I think my sound is just an amalgamation of all of these things. I'll play the hip hop, play the afrobeat, and now that I travel so frequently, I'm exposed constantly to different cultures. I'll throw in the jungle. I’ll throw in the baile funk. Fuck, you know, I'll throw in the Parisian trap that I heard these kids singing along to the time I was there. They all play a part. I've been able to build this world where it's almost like we're constantly traveling, where we've never really arrived.

Where do you want people to arrive through your music?

I want people to arrive at a state of pleasure, confusion, introspection, maybe even a bit of sadness but overall - euphoria. I want them to feel how you do at the other end of a shroom trip. The experience that I strive to create is one that's out of body. I always want for people to be changed. Honestly, whether it's for the better or for the worse is totally up to them. But I want them to come out of the club, like "I don't know where the fuck I just was, and I don't know what we're doing after this, but like, I need more of that." Because I would have to say my favorite feedback is a person saying, “You gave me everything.” I am well-rounded and I am chaotic. And I honestly kind of like for that to come out. I like for people to have headbanging whiplash moments where they're like, “No was that this over blank, like, that's insane!” And I want people to just kind of re-approach the way that they interact with and perceive music, or even songs that they've heard before that are being presented in a new way. So yeah, I just want people to come from a site of experience that I lead, and be changed and transformed completely.

This piece is part of a three-part series profiling the NYC music scene.

Siblings Angel and Lulu Prost make music under the name Frost Children, which they describe to me as “a documentation of the way they bond."

I first heard of their project when I saw them play in person as the surprise musical guests with Dorian Electra at Collina Strada’s spring/summer New York Fashion Week show last September. Then, this past July, I talked to Blaketheman1000 for his premiere of “Dean Kissick,” and after he asked me if I’d interview his friends (Angel and Lulu) for their new music video for “Harp & Pony” (Blake also co-manages them).

For the release, office sat down with the two to talk about the shoot, personas/theratics, exploring things for the first time, “being cringe,” and experiencing your inner self.

What’re your thoughts on the balance of persona and outward facing image with also being vulnerable, and earnest, and trying to capture something that is actually true to yourselves?

Lulu 一 I feel like my relationship with how serious and how goofy I am is a spectrum. It’s always a blank canvas for anything that we’re working on. So, by the end of a track, it will just be somewhere in that spectrum of goofy, and really emotional, and pits of my heart. I think it’s also really fluid now because I don’t really feel scared of being vulnerable when it’s just Angel and I writing together. And we’re already goofing around on any given beat anyway, so sometimes it’s a mixture of both. It all just kind of flows together in the moment.

Angel 一 I feel like Lulu and I approach writing as kind of character based. Not fully random characters that we’re thinking of, but they’re sort of exaggerated forms of ourselves. And we love to play with voices for those characters - like a baby voice, or an emo voice, or a growly, or bitchy sort of self-obsessed voice. And they’re all sides of ourselves. But I think the way that we intonate that as character versions of ourselves is something that we love to do. In “Harp & Pony” that character is this sort of an exaggerated version of me that’s just like, “I just want things. I want material things, and if you give them to me then I’ll be loyal to you.” You know, it's this pretty girl character that's just like, “give me jewels, and give me a harp and a pony.” And, you know, I don't outwardly feel that way about everything, but sometimes I'm like, “I just want stuff. Whoever can give it to me, you’re mine forever, and I’m yours forever.” And the way that it’s delivered in that song reflects that character that’s an exaggerated form of myself.

I feel like wanting attention doesn’t always come from a needy place. Listening to the song, it doesn't seem like a selfish or demanding thing. It's kind of just like, everyone deserves a lot of affection. 

Angel 一 I think that's a good point. I think that the overall tone of the narrator in that song is trying to invite being gifted things because they're so cute and pretty. And it’s like, “how could you not give me stuff?” Rather than being like, “give me stuff.”

How’d the video come about?

Angel 一 We were going out to L.A. a couple months ago. Our friend Sarah Ritter, who’s made some videos for Blake and some other friends, she’s amazing - one of the best artists in L.A. right now. She assembled this crazy team of a DP, and props, and got a set. We were between “Fox Bop” and “Harp & Pony.” It just felt right for “Harp & Pony.” The ideas of the imagery; the props; the sort of magicalness.

Lulu 一 It was definitely the first time we just pulled up to it and they had a concept already, but it still felt like our music video and they were open to whatever we wanted to do. It was one of the most fun days ever. We just got to hold this epic sword in the mountains.

Angel 一 And bounce around the hills on this ranch in Malibu in these human-sized hamster balls. It was just pure joy. It matched the vibe of the song: fast, and cute, and contained - but fantasizing; wanting to conjure things. It makes me want to make more high-budget videos.

Lulu 一 For a while, it was just us filming each other. It was so DIY - just on our iPhone filming. The first couple videos neither of us are in the same shot at the same time because we were just passing the phone because we couldn’t film each other at the same time.

Angel 一 I’m excited to work on projects where we plan stuff. I’ve learned a lot through Blake and other people in New York of sitting down, and making plans to meet, and talk about shooting something or making something. And having a plan. And I think “Harp & Pony” is a really cool first offering of what we can do when we plan - when we try a little extra hard. And there’s a bunch of stuff that we’re working on right now that’s a ton of work. And also collaborating with people visually is something that we’re kind of new to.

Lulu 一 Also, going back to what we were just talking about with characters: we had a session actually the other day with this amazing artist. We were probably in here for ten hours, and made all these different ideas, and it was such a good combination of voices. We had so many different character voices throughout that night. At the end of the day, we were just listening back, and I was just like, “I don’t even know who’s who.”

Angel 一 Yeah. It sounds like there’s 10 people in the session or something.

Lulu 一 Yeah. It’s like when you see a voice actor at a comic con that’s doing those voices on stage and switching between them. I feel like it’s totally like that sometimes - where it’s different characters in the song just talking. Sometimes they’re true to something that we’re actually connecting with, or it’s just a fictional voice that we’re messing with.

Angel 一 Yeah. We’ve been obsessed with this video of a guy singing “Memories” by Maroon 5 in all the characters of Family Guy. And I didn’t really think about the connection between that and our art, but maybe it has to do something like that.

Lulu 一 If there’s any takeaway from this interview it’s to listen to that. Listen at double speed too.

Do you have a theater background, or anything like that, in terms of characters? Or can you think of a time when that might have started to become important to you, or why you might resonate with that? 

Angel 一 I don't have any theater background. We both went to the same high school, and it was very sports centered at the school. There wasn't really much in the arts, music, theater, or visual arts. And I was just so scared to be like a theater kid - like, labeled as that. So, I didn't really engage in proper theater actually ever, a single time.

Lulu 一 I was in the pit band for theater all throughout high school. I was the drummer backstage. So, I met the theater kids, but I wasn’t a theater kid.

Angel 一 I feel like we like explored theater in different ways growing up. And at the age where I would have started engaging with theater, I became really embarrassed easily. I didn't want to take risks. We talk about this a lot. We missed out on a lot of key high school experiences because our school was kind of horrible. It makes everything so fresh now, and I like exploring new things. It's like exploring things for the first time, and adds to a goofiness and silliness.

Lulu 一 With the characters and the theatrical-ness of it, I think it's because like we grew up together, and just consumed so much content - of movies, cartoons, and music. Every kind of music; every different scene, and subscene, of exploring music together. We have that to reference at any given moment. And we can go into all these things together because we can read each other so well.

Angel 一 Yeah. I think a lot of it is early YouTube content creators that feel niche, maybe - like this guy “MysteryGuitarMan,” who would splice up playing different notes together visually, and it’d be a symphony of guitars. People like that were who we connected to growing up. I never really did the theater thing though. I kind of want to do acting though, at some point. Living in New York there’s so many friends of friends that are making films and stuff.

You mentioned that you used to be easily embarrassed in the past. How do you feel like you got to the point of feeling comfortable being more uninhibited and expressive? 

Lulu 一 There’s definitely a hump that we both equally had to get over in college. We went to college in different cities, but at the same time we were working on music on our own, and we were both in dorms. I feel like a lot of people have that experience of sinking into your shell, and not wanting anyone else to hear you. I was kind of in that for a while. I would just wait till all my roommates were gone. Even in high school, I’d wait till my parents would go out, or go in the basement. I think when covid first hit, and we both moved back to St. Louis, we didn’t really have any friends to hang out with, so we were just always together downstairs. We were just kind of going insane, and I think that’s when it started for me. I was just like, “I’m going to stop trying to be so serious around people when I’m trying to really make this whimsical stuff.” I think that’s when it flipped.

Angel 一 Yeah, I think what I realized is there’s nothing really to lose by going over the top - by playing a little bit too many shows, or going a little bit too loud, or overperforming on stage, or doing too much. It’s more excusable than being lackluster and blank. To me, I’m making a career as an artist - I’d rather just go all out. Also, I think us being siblings, there’s a comfort level between us. And kind of no risks. I could say an idea for a lyric that’s the dumbest fucking thing that’s ever been said ever, and I don’t have to worry about Lulu being like, “I don’t know about Angel… that song fucking sucked.”

Lulu 一 It’s dope to be cringed out. That’s another thing: embracing your cringe. If you think about it, it’s honestly so zen. Because you are doing the things that you’re doing wholeheartedly, and then it’s up to everyone else to react to that. You can at least walk away from whatever you do knowing that you did it wholly, and you can’t go down from there. For example, when I was staying at the dorms, I would just scream really loudly right before I was starting to record, just so I would freak out everyone around me through the walls. To just be like, “alright, I can’t get any crazier than that. I already told y’all I’m crazy.” I learned that from my friend John.

Angel 一 Embracing cringe is in. Seeing your mind, and experiencing your inner self. That’s what meditation is. Everyone’s cringe.

Lulu 一 That’s a really good mantra. “The zen of cringe.”

To me, it sort of reads similarly to “radical honesty.” When people express themselves in that way, it obviously makes other people be like, “oh yeah, that’s what everyone wants to do, and what the impulse is, but you just conceal it.” I feel like the more you offer vulnerability, the more it opens up space for that, or influences more of it. 

Angel 一 I have a good example of that. Season 3, episode 3 of SpongeBob. “Just One Bite,” it’s called. And it’s where Squidward admits that he’s never tried a Krabby Patty. So, SpongeBob gets him to try one, and he becomes obsessed with it. But that lowers him down to the masses. You know, everyone likes Krabby Patties, and he’s like, “now so do I.” But he can’t admit it to himself. He can’t admit it to the world. And that would be cringe. He would be one with the people that he used to cringe at. And in the end, it’s like he finds that being radically honest and being like I love Krabby Patties is the most self-actualizing thing.

In terms of trends, how do you navigate the trendiness of certain music, versus just being focused on what you naturally want to make? 

Lulu 一 I feel like it’s all cosplay whenever we embrace or engage in any of that. We’re DJing in Times Square later today. And I’m like, “that’s cosplay.”

Angel 一 I think it’s about keeping the beginners mindset. Being able to operate within a scene. As much as people are like, “that place is too sceney, this gig is too sceney” - music is community. Community is what makes life dope. So, I love to engage in the scene, but there definitely is a point where that can overshadow the music. Not becoming too swept up in the details, or the gossips, or the drama, or the trends. And not trying to label the trends too much. I think when you pay too much attention to what you don’t want to make, I think that gets you too much in a place where you don’t want to make a mistake, or you want to stay in your lane, and not make a mistake. I’d rather make a song that’s extremely zeitgeisty, and not offering anything new, rather than not make anything at all.

What were your separate experiences with music before you decided to work together?

Angel 一 We started producing probably around the same time. Our older brother taught us FL Studio. Started making beats. I was actually just listening to them yesterday because they’re still on Soundcloud. And I was like, “damn, I had ideas.”

Lulu 一 Angel was making club music. And I was making future bass dubstep. We had our own little things.

Angel 一 We kind of started there. Lulu was getting really good at dubstep production and that world. I was exploring other things. I started making trap and lo-fi hip-hop at one point. And then I came to New York [for college], and I was like, “actually, fuck all of that.” I was like, “I want to be in a band.” Like, “rock music is the future. Playing instruments.” You know? And then I was in a band literally up until the pandemic started, and then going back home to Lulu, and revisiting all of those different genres that I experimented with, I was like, “wait, you can do it all.” You don’t have to choose one thing. It’s a ridiculous thing to think about now, when I was like, “I have to be this one thing forever.” It’s like, “no, you don’t.”

Lulu 一 We have our community here that we all support each other, and help each other, and are part of it together, but we all let each other do our own thing. We can kind of go in between different styles, and play different crowds, while also being in the same scene. It’s a lot more and freeing and open.

Angel 一 That’s what’s so cool about the New York music scene. If you go to a show, you can fully expect every artist to sound really different. I think that’s really cool, and doesn’t really happen in a lot of places.

How would you describe “Frost Children” in your own words?

Lulu 一 I think Frost Children is a documentation of the way Angel and I bond.

Angel 一 Frost Children I would describe as breathing and pure expression.

Is there anything else you want to mention?

Lulu - The next year’s going to be a lot of stuff.

Angel - Yeah. Just a lifetime of exploration. And breathing; and expression in its many forms; and community in its many forms. Online, in person. This is all we do, so a lot of stuff is going to happen. We have so many plans, and hopefully it’ll all be bigger than music too and the way that we express things will grow from music to ways that haven’t even been ways for us to express things before.

Oh, I also wanted you to talk more about meditation.

Angel 一 Everything I do is related to it. I’ve been meditating for many years now. Our mom is a therapist, so she sort of put me on the track of mindfulness when I was a teenager. Every morning I go up on the roof - I sit and zazen for 10 minutes. Just breathing. And just kind of coming to oneness. I’m not trying to attain anything, but meditation is the expression of oneness, and seeing yourself. And some days you don’t feel great after meditation. Some days you feel amazing after, but it’s all part of the practice. And I think it’s given me laser focus, and big picture. I read this book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryū Suzuki. He’s a buddhist monk from the 60’s. He wrote about the single minded way of one railway track with even, parallel tracks. They don’t get bigger; they don’t get narrower. Your life is just even - going down the railway track. And the scenery around you on the train changes over the course of your life, but it’s an eternal track that never stops. It’s been going forever. You’re on it right now. And meditation is just about keeping that track straight, but at the same time zen is an oxymoron, where the more you talk about it, and the more you read about it, and the more you think… in the end, it’s a pure experience with all encompassing, impossible to describe, oneness. Making an intention to experience that every morning has a dramatic effect. And when I go to bed - after I’ve plugged my phone in, turned the lights off, with my head on the pillow - I think of five things I’m grateful for. It’s a really nice way to end the day.

Enjoying quinn’s tricked-out sonic footprint doesn’t necessarily mean understanding it, so if you never happened to understand it in the first place, then that’s great! Because she never wanted you to.

17 years old and making music since long before then, she’s dutifully peppered the internet with opaque tunes wrapped in inconspicuous packages, her scatterbrained sonic experiments separated solely by a smattering of odd monikers. In one SoundCloud loosie she quietly released as “DJ Weird Bitch” three months ago — its self-explanatory title: “dj weird bitch goes to NTS live headquarters and sets off a 7 yottabyte zip bomb on the wifi network” — she oscillates mercilessly between sped-up Japanese city pop sax solos, muddied rap-adjacent chatter, and glitched-out barrages punctuated by nifty transitions. Line that up with her most recent project, an eponymous 30-minute LP that puts mellow vocal performances in conversation with the controlled chaos of far-reaching musical contexts, and what you’re left with is a series of unconnectable dots. But when all is said and done, the dots may never have been meant for connection.

“I like adding shit to the cinematic quinneverse,” she says, poring over a bottle of Poland Spring in a busy internet cafe, as her longtime manager cheerfully nods along. It’s about a half-hour before noon on the Lower East Side, and in another thirty or so minutes, she’ll be headed over to the Good Company — a homely, youth-oriented fashion storefront on Allen Street — for a pop-up event where she’s slated to meet fans of hers in-person for the first time in her life. Come 7 PM, she’ll be in Brooklyn to play her first ever concert at the live music venue Elsewhere, chosen specifically for the intimate, living room-esque artist-to-audience dynamic offered by one of its smaller stages. She speaks with a hushed, gravelly-yet-playful inflection that sounds a little bit like a wise parent explaining why they aren’t angry with you, just disappointed. “I need to, bro,” she continues. “I like there being multiple characters to everything I do. I like people seeing me and being like, ‘Is it you? Or you? Or you? Or you?’ I like the vast discography thing. People hear the most popular song I made, and then they hear the ambient tape I made a year ago, and it’s like, ‘Yo, is this the same person? What the fuck?’”

Today, quinn is, at the very least, recognizable enough for me to spot her. When I arrive at the corner of Grand and Eldridge, she’s flanked by a cheery young group that includes her aforementioned manager Jesse, a lanky Finn Wolfhard doppelganger who makes esoteric music under the name saturn, the creative director of grassroots indie label DeadAir Records — to which she’s been signed since last year — and a few other giddy label-mates. “We’re trying to find this journalist,” she says calmly, scanning the surrounding streets behind ovular wire frames. When I reveal that I am, in fact, the journalist (she misheard my introduction over the chatter and thought I was another collaborator of hers named Sabbath), she tells me between poses for a group BeReal selfie that she’s only been in New York for a matter of hours.

The fast-paced day-to-day — from playing Fortnite and smoking weed with friends under a week ago, to trekking to the Big Apple for the most important 10-hour stretch of her career — is both on-brand, and an ebb she’s had to grow more and more accustomed to since storming into the limelight over the past 24 months. The track that put her onto most listeners’ radars was “i dont want that many friends in the first place,” a hyperactive rap number that sees her brazenly rail against the baggage of dead weight over the course of a whiplash-inducing upward climb like her own. At this point in her career, it registers as a necessary gospel. “If you can’t keep up, then okay,” she says matter-of-factly, midway through speaking on the collective progress-oriented mindset she shares with DeadAir. “We’re all trying to make a living. This is our life. And if it’s not your life, too, then no hard feelings, but we’re cutting you out.”

A military kid with a worldview informed by constant movement, and the unforgiving grind of a musical come-up backgrounded by nights spent on couches and floors, quinn both admits, and has been told by countless others, that she’s wise beyond her years. It’s a trait that will come in handy for the pivotal career junction she finds herself in, signaled in grand fashion by a day like today. At DeadAir, she’s gearing up to officially take on a tinge of increased responsibilities as soon as she’s legally old enough to sign them into action. She’s adamant about maintaining a majority of creative control over her cultural product — something she’ll be able to do more contractually when she turns 18 in December — and, with trust incurred among label peers who respect her for her wisdom, the keys are more or less being handed to her to do just that. “Moving around and being a kid and growing up," she says, "it’s never been too much for me, because it feels like I’ve always had too much on my plate.”

Quinn’s youth never really got to look like that of most other kids — no play-dates, no longtime friends, no sitcom-ready at-home hangouts — but at this stage, the best of both the young and old worlds melded together in her persona are spilling into one another. A matter of days ago, she was in Philadelphia playing the aforementioned Fortnite and smoking the aforementioned weed with friends and label-mates. These moments double as the That 70’s Show-esque blunt sessions she missed out on growing up, and the business meetings there won’t be any shortage of in the foreseeable future. “Shit gets hectic sometimes, but that’s just how we work,” she explains. Her Sopranos-esque spiel is somewhat enlivened by her all-black attire, reigning in an ominous inconspicuity familiar to her music: she’s wearing black leather boots, a pair of black tactical cargo pants, a spiked chain that swings menacingly from one black belt loop to another, and a black headwrap. “We work fast, and we work quietly. When it’s business, it’s all business. None of that drama, none of that family shit. Business comes first, then we worry about everything else. That’s why we rehearse first, then smoke weed and play Fortnite after. You know what I mean?”

This doesn’t mean that family shit isn’t in the equation at some level. Jesse Taconelli, a former music journalist who doubles as quinn’s manager and the founder of DeadAir Records, crossed paths with her through coverage of the local hyperpop scene for a publication he was working with. Much of the groundwork for DeadAir was laid by similar roots, lasting connections stemming from times Taconelli interviewed artists and “wouldn’t want the conversation to stop there.” His discovery of quinn came at the peak of a fertile-yet-futile industry moment in which young, upstart acts would take fairly new genres like hyperpop by storm, then whether due to lack of resolve on their parts, or mishandling on the management level, fizzle out as quickly as they emerged. He split with his job to found his grassroots label in hopes of giving quinn a shot at something better, and, in turn, stumbled upon something better for himself as well.

“I was working as a janitor at a Whole Foods when quinn hired me,” Taconelli says, a second after which quinn instructs me to “put this in the interview.” “When she came back from the hiatus and the cat mother [another of quinn’s several monikers, this one dedicated mostly to jungle] stuff, I just wanted to have a talk, and it changed my life. From being a full-time janitor at a Whole Foods to working with quinn.

“Our first convo was just about shoegaze music,” he continues, as the woman who will go on to save this interview by hunting us down and returning my forgotten tape recorder takes a seat nearby. “My Bloody Valentine was the topic. I could just tell we got along. I asked to hear [quinn’s] record — it was a very early take on Drive-By Lullabies — and the rest was history.”

“I sent him the draft,” quinn adds, “and he agreed to get to work on it, as a team. And yeah, shit was history after that.”

Drive-By Lullabies was quinn’s 2021 DeadAir debut, and its cover — her upper body holding an intricate drum machine in front of her head — quickly became an image seared into the brains of longtime listeners, and soon-to-be fans alike. Much like quinn’s overarching lore writ large, it spread like wildfire, mostly fueled by word-of-mouth. (I was sent an Apple Music link to it by a college friend after a long post-midnight conversation about the Neptunes sparked by getting lost on campus.) In its most streamed track on Spotify, the sinister, rustling PSA “from paris, with love,” she sneers threateningly abrasive mantras into a void studded with trap-infused vampire thriller beats and ominous, click-tracky snares. “You gon’ have to kill me if you want me,” she warns in the song’s first verse, her monotone registering as both numb and a little bit disinterested. The detachment makes her words all the more potent. “Put down your guns, approach me slowly / Black suit, camouflaged, can’t see shit / How you hop up on the wave, but you’re seasick?”

Much of the record banked on this on-edge ethos, a focal point of its messaging being hinged by the anxious sense of someone on the cusp of just as many dangers as triumphs. quinn, its month-old 2022 follow-up, sounds like something a bit closer to the light at the end of the tunnel — it boasts a more polished, less mixtape-ish feel; quinn’s vocals seem to come with ease; it feels like a message from the throne, rather than one from an aggressive contender for it — albeit, for all the ostensible ground gained, it refuses to let go of the rough roots that forged its peaks. Before I got a chance to listen to it in full, the same college friend who introduced me to Drive-By Lullabies sent me a link to “Two Door Tiffany,” the fourth track on the new record. “The way I see it,” she muses in its opening lyrics, “there’s a war inside me / and I don’t go nowhere, I don’t let myself go / So with those words out now, I think I’ll let you know.” Her parting message embodies the vulnerable chord her music has struck with listeners up to now: “This next segment is for anybody who's stressed… Depressed, uh, fuckin', I don't know, hahaha.”

For a while, this was quinn. “I was going through a lot,” she tells me, citing the comfort of her four walls as a reprieve she basked in before she was willing to do things like what she’s gearing up to do today. “I didn’t want to go through that outside of my room. I didn’t want to come here and still be going through some shit and ruin the whole experience. But now I feel like I’m recovering. I’ve been recovering from a very long depression. Now is the perfect time to see that there’s more to life.”

The sentiment wastes little time echoing itself. Upon entering the pleasantly air-conditioned Good Company — after getting lost several times en route, which quinn enjoys, because she’s planning to move out to New York soon and is taking every chance she can get to scope out the city — it doesn’t take long for us to see what exactly the “more to life” she’s talking about looks like. Before the first few awestruck fans enter, the room is occupied by the same cheery bunch from the corner of Grand and Eldridge, with the addition of DeadAir co-founder Billie Bugara, and a few giddy friends intermittently taking the first few group flicks of what will be a long day of “_______ mentioned you in their story” notifications for the phenom at the center of attention.

“She’s been on the label as long as we’ve had the label,” Bugara tells me, midway through a conversation about freelance writing and imposter syndrome. “Actually, the first piece I ever wrote for Complex was about her. It was the ‘Best New Artist’ thing, but it was, like, a blurb. We’ve always been at each other’s sides in a certain way. Because I’m not doing the music stuff like she is, and she’s not doing my stuff, you know? But we can still help each other out. We’ve been on a steady rise.

“When we started the label, it was just like, ‘How could we not have her on it?’,” she continues. “Especially with the trust dynamic and stuff, and how she’s responded to other, major labels. This fit is so perfect for her, and now we’re here.”

Back at Granddaddy’s Cafe, quinn told me that it was her uncle who informed her of “how evil the industry was.” (Before signing to DeadAir, quinn rejected offers from labels including Universal, Interscope, and 300.) “He educated me on that shit, because he’s seen it all happen. He was a DJ back in the 90s, him and my dad, Baltimore club, all that shit. They’re legends, they have no fucking clue. But he taught me the difference between business and a family.”

In the tiny interior of the Good Company, if it isn’t family, it’s hard to tell what else quinn’s DeadAir crew could be. The label’s modest clientele sheet is made up of quinn, the aforementioned esoteric act saturn, and the upstart indie songster Jane Remover. Aside from them, other figures that arrive at the Good Company to share laughs and selfies include the digicore innovator angelus, the concrete-grinned fashion heartthrob Oliver Leone, the Indiana-bred hyperpop scene graduate Midwxst, and the prolific eldia DJ Dazegxd. When followers of quinn’s begin to trickle through the cracked storefront door, and, over the course of the afternoon, the talkative congregation spills out into the surrounding streets, it’s difficult to tell who — from the local high school students nervously encircling their favorite artists to ask for photos, to the fashionable adults befriending each other over conversations about underground music — is on a pedestal, and who isn’t. Much like the modus operandi of her first show in a few hours, the scales are even, and it’s a familial sense that feels nurtured, if not intentional.

“I think it’s definitely a big change,” one local high school student tells me of the new album, “between something she would put out in, say, 2020, versus what she just dropped. You could tell it’s a big shift, whether it be in direction, or stylistic choices. I’d say it’s definitely welcome, because you could see artists that never really change from what they blew up doing, or never really grow. But with quinn, I feel like that versatility and the ability to go from some stupid electronics to some more chill, R&B type shit, makes her a really interesting artist to listen to.”

Another high school student, who goes to a school with mean science teachers in the Bronx, stopped by because he saw the pop-up on quinn’s Instagram story, and is actively deciding whether he will try to persuade his strict dad to let him attend the concert tonight. “quinn got me into Eric[doa], Eric got me into Midwxst, then Midwxst got me into the new wave of hyperpop,” he tells me. “It all started with quinn. quinn opened me up to everything.”

A more literal embodiment of the family-esque dynamic comes when quinn’s brother, an imposing-albeit-chill fellow quinn introduces as “the biggest dude you’ve ever seen,” arrives to the tune of frenzied commotion, hugs, and a large assemblage at the storefront’s window. He took a bus here from Baltimore the second he heard that the event was happening, and plans to get something to eat before biking all the way to Brooklyn for the concert once the pop-up ends (partly because he doesn’t want to risk getting lost on the Subway).

“I watched quinn grow up, man,” he says, toting a joint and leaning against a wall outside. “This been quinn’s dream. So when I heard the show was happening, no matter what I had to do to come up here, I was going to do it.”

quinn’s latest album opens with the mantra “there’s no need to knock the hustle when you kinda are the hustle,” and, one track later, features the triumphant assertion that “I’m in a new place, I’m in a new light / I’m where I’ve always wanted to be.” None of these factors — the hustle, nor the new light — can exist without the other, and for her, it’s a sentiment she’s embodied long enough to speak on from the outside looking in, rather than the dark-shrouded position she long occupied, wondering whether she’d ever get to where she is now. As much success as it’s already wielded, for both herself and DeadAir, the upward climb continues to prove necessary. But at least for now, no level of acclaim can convince quinn to have it any other way. “There’s fun to be found in the grind,” she says. “You stop grinding, that’s when shit’s boring. It’s like having all the cheat codes to the video game. The fuck you gonna do now?

“I mean that,” she continues, segueing to the opening mantra of her new LP. “There’s no need to knock the hustle if you kinda are the hustle. I am the hustle.”

Knocking the hustle often stems from not understanding it, and understanding quinn’s hustle looks like understanding her music. Fear not: if you never happened to understand it in the first place, then that’s great! Because she never wanted you to.

Genesis Evans is cruising down the lively neighboring streets of Prospect Park in an all-black Nissan Rogue, ambitious ideas leaving his mouth with the mechanical speed of rugged, veteran subway rats — of which, in our destination of the Eartern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum 2/3 Station below, many are lurking. One of these ideas revolves around hopes for a collaborative endeavor with Xbox. It’s a core facet of his fit for today: hanging loosely over a pair of straight-legged navy blue bottoms is a lime-green Seattle Sounders jersey, the word “XBOX” emblazoned in larger-than-life letters across its front.

Spoken with a sense of modest earnesty long focal to his lore, the plan makes sense coming out of his mouth. It’s just that there’s one crippling, damning roadblock: “...How do I talk to someone at Xbox?,” he says, with a burst of laughter. He quiets down, and turns his steely gaze, searing through Urkel-esque tortoise-shell frames, back towards the road. “I have these crazy ideas,” he admits, solemnly. “I hope to one day, when I have them, have people say ‘Hold on, let me actually listen to him.’”

These days, a good amount of ears are perked. A few weeks ago, Evans, who used to drop one-off loosies under the moniker “foghornleghornn” before switching over to “genny!”, independently released 8 SONGS, a far-ranging debut album that somehow manages to squeeze chopped-up baptist-church chipmunk soul, transcendental Yoshi samples, and funk-inflected digi-core raps into 22 scorching minutes. Everything about the record — from its running time, to the mid-joyride artwork gracing its cover, to some of its most thrilling moments — points a finger back to an elusive sense of haste. It's a value doubled down upon by its title: 8 SONGS may register as impulsive, because in some ways, that’s exactly what it was.

Two weekends ago at the cozy Brooklyn bar Gold Sounds, Evans performed his own music live for the first time on a bill consisting of, among other upstart skate-adjacent acts, Florida skater-slash-rapper 454, and gritty New York spitter Niontay. A matter of days before he graced the stage in a McDonald’s-branded NASCAR baseball cap and a burgundy wig, he had considered quitting music. “Right before I dropped, I was like ‘Man, I’m about to quit music and everything,’” he says, meeting me across the street from the towering Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, and beginning to lead me down a lengthy route that seems familiar. “Because I [had] been sitting on it for so long, stressing myself out. But having that show forced me to put it out. I didn’t want to do the show without having stuff out. I didn’t even care at that point. I felt like it was the right time. But I at first didn’t feel like it.”

And for a while, he didn’t have the necessary patience, either. One evening back in December, Evans was grinning in the endearingly-cluttered studio room of his Bed-Stuy apartment, prefacing selections from a desktop bearing hundreds of audio files with brief, spoken blurbs about the various projects he had mustered the inspiration to start, but lacked the follow-through to finish. He played early versions of “REGAL” and “ZOINKS!” on a floor-rumbling speaker, contemplating whether, and how, to rearrange certain verses, put lyrics where there weren’t any, or revamp the sonics of musical undertakings he already had a footprint on. Something Evans believes to heart is that he’s here, on planet Earth, “to inspire people,” and for a long time, much like that afternoon, the fuel for such inspiration remained trapped within his four walls. This happened for a variety of reasons: maybe for music, he was stuck in a cycle of perfectionist edits; maybe for fashion, the attention span (and finances) necessary to support Humble, the folk-legend streetwear brand he founded with Conor Prunty years ago, were at a low; maybe with art, more paintings were being started than completed. But across all mediums, the consistent factor was that baggage was being accumulated — and just when he’d venture towards getting rid of one heap, another would always present itself.

“I wouldn’t be able to work on other things, on my own, as well as I can now,” he says, channeling an analogy that likens his cluttered creative headspace to a messy room. “Because I would just be thinking about my messy room. It’s harder to work on other things, because I would always be like ‘I should be cleaning my room.’ I’ve sat on this project for so long. That’s what this project felt like. The room keeps getting more filled up, and more filled up. Now, I feel like it’s clean a little bit.”

Sonically, 8 SONGS sounds like what the disparate bowels of a freshly-used vacuum might look like, broad nuggets of sonic ephemera juxtaposed with one another in a way that’s as enthralling to consume as it must have been to create. (With a smile, he mentions that a friend told him he “invented a new genre.”) On “hostess,” a bubbly number that boasts a masterful combination of slinky auto-tune tenors and layered bass riffs likenable to meat falling off the bone, he skirts his way around playful tales about how he eats “the motherfucking cake like it’s hostess,” boasting endearingly about his love being big enough to fill a mansion, and lamenting with tongue-in-cheek flair on the perils of everyone being the same (“but not me, though”). The following track, “FEELING” — a sped-up version of which was previewed in the outro of “hostess”’s music video this past May — features churned-out, slow-burn waves of reverbed electric guitar foregrounded by mellow vocals, not too far in nature from the skater-slash-musician’s reserved speaking voice. It resonates like the sort of lighthearted, city-bred living limerick Patia Borja references when she captions patiasfantasyworld posts with “#nyc”: “Feeling all the emotions," he narrates in its opening verse, "Still balling and boasting / She calling me a hoe / Sorry I don't even know / What your girl said she saw / Is they friend? Is they foe? / Will I land? Will I fall? You be playing on the low.”

Both sonically and lyrically, the most somber moment on 8 SONGS comes in its opening track, “REGAL,” which Evans recorded alongside his younger brother in the wee hours of the morning while his mother dealt with a health scare during the pandemic. He sounds like a ghost. The song’s instrumental backing — sampled from the Nintendo 64 game Yoshi’s Story, and featuring, if you listen closely, his little brother humming along — hinges on warped moments of tension and release, Evans’ funereal murmur bridging the gaps between life and death with lofty, directionless existentialism. “When the steam blows, where will we go?,” he asks, denatured strings echoing his disorientation. “Can we go by the rocks at Prospect Park, sit and stare at the people?”

Today in Brooklyn, the answer is yes. It’s exactly this that lies at the end of the winding thirty-minute walk that started with Evans meeting me at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, cutting through lawns and rocky roadways, dodging summer camp cohorts rife with rugrats in bright T-shirts, and navigating through greenery-laden shortcuts. At some point, he slows to a near-stop and gestures toward a railing overlooking a quiet lake. Sitting next to me on the banister, he periodically gets up to squash charred joints against the pavement, looking down at the water every now and again to observe large swans and their interactions with very small turtles who swim in bunches around them.

“I feel like I’ve always attracted people who I felt were just truly themselves,” he says, as a bunch of summer campers straggle behind their counselors to gawk at the sea creatures. “They would inspire me, and I would inspire them. I feel like it just happens by being naturally you. If you are just naturally, unapologetically you, you are going to inspire me. And I think that same thing is transferred with everything I do that inspires people, no matter what it is.”

For a majority of those familiar with his story, the first facet of Evans that proved broadly inspirational was his skating. Hailing from a generative batch of scrawny homies-turned-legends who flocked Brooklyn’s skateboarding infrastructure and frequented Tompkins Square Park, he forged a niche online legend with personable clips uploaded to an intimate, impulsively-titled YouTube channel called foghornleghornn, and the aforementioned streetwear brand Humble he co-founded alongside Conor Prunty. In one cinematic short titled “Genny’s Day Out,” uploaded to the foghornleghornn channel in 2017, he navigates the streets of Brooklyn like a 21st Century take on Forrest Gump, skating from impromptu run-ins with boisterous friends, to brush-ups with rushy modeling scouts who assure him they’ll make him a superstar, to charming moments with newfound romantic interests. By the video’s final frame — a modest floral offering of his fluttering into Humble’s equally-modest hand-drawn logo — it feels like, corny as it may sound, the cliche made apparent through its messaging rings true: the only one keeping your life from being interesting is you.

Working at Supreme’s Lafayette Street location for years upon leaving high school, Evans briefly skated for the team, his beanie-clad, Cookie (a la Ned’s Declassified)-esque image reigning in a welcome sense that the sport wasn’t solely reserved for swagged-out cool kids in designer wear, but anyone comfortable enough in their own skin to do it their way. In 2020, he took the do-it-yourself gospel into his own hands: within 24 hours of stumbling upon the Wikipedia page of his estranged grandfather, the Panamanian jazz musician Carlos Garnett, and mustering a long-churning passion to pursue music on his own, he quit his job.

Two years removed from the decision, things are beginning to make more sense in retrospect than they may have as they were happening. The sentiment isn’t lost on the music. “Now, even looking at the album artwork, I’m just like ‘Wow, this is such a fragment of my life,’” Evans says, grinning. “It’s my first car, my first project… I look at this Yoshi [plush] all the time… Everything just low-key randomly fucking worked out.

“It just made sense,” he continues. “When I made the ‘REGAL’ beat, I didn’t even have a car yet, but I could hear a car door closing, so I added that and it made sense. And then, I didn’t even think about it, but I was just like ‘’toeonthegas’ has to be next.’ But now that I’m thinking about it, ‘toe on the gas’ is like starting the car. And the Yoshi sample is in that, and that’s what I’m looking at on the dashboard. Then the colors remind me of ‘simple’ and ‘MILAH’S POEM’ and ‘REGAL’ — the color of the painting is the color of those songs, to me. But then the sun in the back is more like the end, like ‘hostess’ and ‘ZOINKS!’. It all just made sense. But I wasn’t thinking about it this deeply when I was making it… I was just making it. And it’s fucking crazy how that shit happens.”

Creativity is inherently indebted to a similar brand of entropy, and for Evans, the wide-ranging creative impulses he felt as a kid are now beginning to materialize into something concrete. But as much as the imagination may be sustaining itself with more flecks of maturity, the kid in Evans still has yet to go anywhere. Cruising down the lively neighboring streets of Prospect Park in his Nissan Rogue to drop me off at the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum Subway Station, it’s this version of him that rails off ingenious idea after ingenious idea, threads of scatterbrained youthfulness visibly beginning to latch onto spindles of aged reasoning.

At one point, he tells me he wants to someday have a solo art exhibition. “I’ve been in a lot of group shows when I was younger,” he says, the failed kickflips of a practicing pre-teen skater slapping against pavement in the near distance. “And those are fun. But it’s usually more of a reason for people to get together, get fucked up and hang out. It’s fun, but I’m so over that shit. I want to do something that has some passion and some meaning behind it.”

Please confirm that you are at least 18 years old.