![]() “ Hitkidd sent me the ‘Running Out Of Love’ beat, and I recorded on it first and then went back to find the guitarist to add to it,” Duke says. Instead of looping a guitar riff, Duke uses the instrument more as accompaniment, with guitarists jamming alongside tracks like “Running Out of Love” and “I’m Alive Again,” creating a rap-rock sound that’s more like a full-band improvisation or Tiny Desk Concert than a mere sample. While hardly the only rapper out there dabbling in rock, Duke Deuce’s incorporation of guitar is fundamentally different from most emo rap or nu-metal revival music. “So rock was already something I loved and felt like I could do.” “Growing up, me and my pops listened to all kinds of different music, classical music and rock music too,” he says. Along with plenty of the heavy crunk bass you expect, Duke pushes his music from the club to the mosh pit: CRUNKSTAR is one part Memphis car show, one part Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Kid Cudi's 2008 Debut Mixtape to Stream for the First TimeĬardi B Enlists Kanye West, Lil Durk to Flaunt Some 'Hot Sh-t'ĭuke’s latest album, CRUNKSTAR, builds off his full-bodied Southern sound but embraces new wavelengths. Lil Uzi Vert Drops Surprise 'I Know' Song Ahead of 'Red & White' EP “But we’ve also got that phonk sound that a lot of people are starting to use, and that smooth pimping sound, so there’s a lot of places you can go with the Memphis style.” “I know I always talk about crunk music, which originated in Memphis and was originally called buck,” he says. But just like the culturally rich city he hails from, Duke refuses to let himself be defined by one sound or style. It was beautiful.Duke broke through the walls and banged down the doors in early 2020 with “Crunk Ain’t Dead,” an effortless and amped-up slice of Southern rap revivalism, and he’s become known for explosive, almost martial bangers suited for club sound systems and trunk speakers. That level of vulnerability is admirable to say the least. I’m neither a musician nor can I speak to the meaning of Gap Year’s lyrics, but I can imagine that to play emo music, and to play it well, requires a person to tap into all that is both painful and poetically just, like the familiar scent of an ex-lover that refuses to leave your pillow a week after they’ve left. It sounded like Ethan and Phipps were singing with an honesty that can only be found in the deepest part of a person’s chest cavity. And they were thriving, that’s what made it all so special. There’s an awe and a little voice saying, we might be ok, that comes with watching people fully thrive in a different element than the one you know them from. I believe, whether we know it or not, so many of us have a feeling of reverence when we watch our homies do something like this, something outside of snowboarding. None of the commotion, not the crowd surfers or the mosh, seemed to break Gap Year’s concentration. Unbreakable concentration | Photo: Tommy Towns ![]() I also want to note that at one point I looked over and saw Keegan, fresh from playing nine holes, polo shirt moshing in a crowd of eyeliner and black painted fingernails. There were a few stage divers who shared the same doomed fate as Jack Black in the beginning of School of Rock, where the crowd parts like the Red Sea leaving only the ground as cushion. Some went successfully, being carried around like heroes or celebrities. This happened quite a bit during Gap Year because people were trying to crowd surf. Any time I saw a homie go down there was one right behind them to get them off the ground. In an attempt to calm Katie Kennedy’s fears of being trampled in the mosh, Phipps said, “nah, everyone’s hella respectful in a Gap Year mosh pit.” He wasn’t wrong. I mention this because he said something that night that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It was JP’s 21 st birthday about a week ago. ![]() ![]() “I think I broke my nose last night during And One,” Squid mused to me over the phone the next day while driving up to Brighton. From above it probably looked like we were the balls in Hungry Hungry Hippos, just bouncing off each other with no clear idea of where we want to go but knowing we don’t want to go towards the edges. Each body was at the mercy of the one next to it. At the snap of a finger-or in this case the tapping of two drumsticks and a call for Salt Lake to “fuck this shit up”-the room broke out into a collective seizure. The switch flip from no mosh to mosh was astounding. Shoulder to shoulder, we patiently awaited what was And One’s first show. We all heard the music outside and rushed in. And One is a Salt Lake emocore hodgepodge, seeing as Jake and Parviz are from World Worst and Koshe, two other SLC bands. The official And One debut | Photo: Tommy Townsīut, before Catalyst and Gap Year, there was And One. ![]()
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