Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
The amount of musical knowledge that AL99 has obtained in his 25 years on Earth is more than most people can hope for in a lifetime. The DMV-based rapper has been putting his work in, and now he is blasting onto the scene with his new single “Pop” where he’s not holding back or pulling punches.
“It’s a Chicago style/trap song,” AL99 says. “It has infectious lyrics and bars, is fast, energetic and catchy, and tells a nice street story that is both authentic to Al’s experiences, and relatable for anyone who has experienced street life.”
“Pop” was originally written in 2023 but when he was writing it, he was just in the process of getting outside more in the underground. He was starting to do bigger shows, as he was a frequent performer at Brooklyn Music Kitchen, and seeing more and more that was inspiring him to write.
AL99 went into making “Pop” with the idea that he was going all out. He is staking his claim to tell the world that it is his time after grinding away in the studio and in front of audiences across the country.
“I came up in the underground circles and there is a lot of stuff that happens there where you sit back and say, ‘well I’ve been working really hard,’” he says. “I make the beats. I write the songs. I record it myself and I mix and master.”
“Pop” starts with a simple trap beat with a lot of speed, and it helped form his flow that he has pouring out of him on the track. He admits it isn’t something he can even pinpoint, and that this is unique to “Pop.”
“When I was writing it there was definitely not a thought process for the flow,” AL99 says. “I was thinking that I had to get my message out in a very powerful way. I wanted to make these lyrics punchy.”
He adds, “I sat down and made the beat with the intention of writing that song. I have 1,000 beats on my laptop and sometimes I can just pick a beat, but with this one I wanted this beat, with a specific cadence, and specific lyrics.’
Another element of the release of “Pop” is the music video, which shows him busting out lyrics on the mic, partying in studio before ripping out the energetic flow, reflecting on the sites around him. He’s seen hitting spots like the downtown Brooklyn Pier and the Biggie Mural.
“I can be very comfortable and serene alone, or I can turn up if it’s my thing,” AL99 says. “If they’re people I love and trust, I’m more willing to let my guard down and have fun. It kind of tells the story that I’m a popular loner, which is definitely authentic to how I operate in real life.”
AL99 has always had an eclectic set of interests and hobbies. He was on top of his game academically, had big interests in engineering and all STEM fields, played multiple sports, and started playing guitar at the age of six. He made his first beat before the age of 10 and started writing raps, but he never really thought he would take music into a professional career. But it is also something that is simply in his blood.
AL99’s grandfather Herbert “Tubo” Rhoad was one of the original five singers/members of the Persuasions, a legendary acapella group from Brooklyn that toured with the likes of Joni Mitchell, and are forever enshrined in the Acapella Hall of Fame.
Having grown up as the child of a major professional touring artist, AL99’s mother was wary at first of supporting any of her children choosing to follow her in her father’s footsteps. But as AL99 got older, he knew it was something he had to pursue. His mom agreed with one condition: to learn the business of to ensure that he would learn how to own copyrights, masters, name, and production/publishing rights.
His musical background and taste works directly into his style, whether he is recording or playing in front of a crowd. With influences including Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix on guitar, the performance ability of Michael Jackson, and rappers like Kendrick Lamar, AL99 feels just as comfortable with a guitar in his hands as he does with a microphone. After spending the last six years honing his craft on the mic and strings, he feels confident now to let it rip anywhere at any time.
“There are so many ideas that pop into my mind now, and I also feel that it’s just the experience of life that has allowed me to find inspiration at the drop of a dime,” he says.
AL99 has earned degrees in Audio Production and Music Business, and he also draws inspiration on his production side from studying icons like Quincy Jones, Darkchild, and Dr. Dre.
As mentioned before, not only does he own his own label in TPC Music Production, LLC., but he also recently signed a distribution deal with Universal Music Group/Bungalo, furthering his musical journey and giving him more visibility to a wider audience.
While he has been at it for six years now, the world has just seen the beginning, as AL99 has plans to release a new single every two months. He has more than 100 songs completely written, and some recorded, showing that he has plenty on the horizon.
What’s in store is in accordance with one of AL99’s personas “Versatile AL,” in that the songs and future projects he will release will be eclectic, genre bending/defying, and unique to his own crafted style. He’s been formulating this style by taking a bit of inspiration from studying some of the greatest artists and musicians of all time.
His next expected single titled “Superduper” will touch on that versatility showcasing a much slower tempo melodic trap/sing rap style track and will show some of what AL99 can do vocally and lyrically. It is set to be released within the next two months.
As Al stated, “One of my brothers out in DC actually coined me ‘Versatile Al,’ and the reason why that’s so fitting is that not only in my music I’m versatile, in my life I’m versatile. There are so many songs in the vault, man. I’m just excited to see it unfold.
Follow the musical journey of AL99 and check out his new single “Pop” available on all platforms.
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Stop scrolling. Look up. Let your imagination run free and make your own decisions. These are the genuine desires hidden beneath the chaotic exterior of ‘Fangs’, the bold third album from south London art-rock quartet HMLTD. Its stories of cocks and cuckolds, German philosophy and biblical sacrifice compete for attention against a sound that shifts between musical theatre, gabber techno and a style of industrial EDM the band have dubbed ‘ÜberGoth’.
The album explores these ideas through the figure of gothic horror’s most stylish villain, the soul-sucking vampire. Beneath the dark imagery, however, ‘Fangs’ examines the dangers of social media and the consequences of blindly following algorithms. “The vampire lives this existence bereft of love, bereft of sunlight, bereft of any joy except the addiction of consumption. And I think that modern man is subject to that same narrowing,” explains frontman Henry Spychalski.
For his conversation with NME, Spychalski has picked Maison Bertaux, a French patisserie dating back to the 19th century in the centre of Soho. As with much of HMLTD’s world, the choice of setting is intentional. Sporting slicked-back, bleached hair and a long, sharply tailored black coat, Spychalski settles down for a cream tea while explaining his ambition to embrace the life of a “flâneur”, a Baudelairean bohemian, by spending as much time as possible in places like this. Thoughtful and expressive, he is someone who rarely chooses one syllable when four will do. However, in the lead-up to ‘Fangs’, the singer and his band began to drift away from the unconventional way of life they had held onto since forming a decade earlier.
An entire album, titled ‘Where Is The Tunnel, This Must Be The Light’, now sits abandoned in HMLTD’s archives. The band spent a year making it, using £40,000, which accounted for most of the advance for their third album. “We recorded it very much as a traditional band in a studio, and I think that what we ended up with was something that we felt very disconnected from. I don’t think it had anything to do with what HMLTD is really about, which has always been experimentation and trying to push the boundaries, even if you fail,” Spychalski says.
“We ended up sounding like Neutral Milk Hotel, and I like Neutral Milk Hotel, but I don’t want to be Neutral Milk Hotel because I want to be something new – or at least try to be. I’d rather try and fail to do something new than succeed at doing something that’s already been done.”
‘Fangs’’ sneery, glammy lead single ‘I Used To Ride In Limousines’ acts as a manifesto of sorts. In musical theatre, Spychalski explains, “you have this notion of the ‘I want’ track, where the main character projects their future success and their future glories.” Having signed in their infancy to Sony Music, before soon parting ways and eventually releasing 2020 debut ‘West of Eden’ and its conceptual 2023 follow-up ‘The Worm’ through independent label Lucky Number, HMLTD’s version of the “I want” track became its inverse.
“It’s about the ego death that you go through when you have that form of success, and then you lose it in some sense,” the vocalist says. “It’s about wanting to be free of those notions and to have your own totally self-defined version of success that isn’t contingent on any kind of external voice – one that refutes the notion of success full stop, and that actually delights in the liberty of failure.
“As soon as you start trying to manipulate your work in order to appeal to an external audience in any form, you slowly start to become more and more alienated from it. Whether that’s in the context of being on a major label or trying to get X amount of Instagram followers, I don’t think it makes too much of a difference,” he continues. “The point is that you’re prostituting yourself and you’re going to start making work that doesn’t truly reflect you. And with that process, there’s no black-and-white line where a devil comes into the room, and you sign your soul away. It’s far more insidious, and it happens in increments.”
“I’d rather try and fail to do something new than succeed at doing something that’s already been done” – Henry Spychalski
As pushback, the ethos behind creating ‘Fangs’ became one of “trying to shield yourself from outside influence as much as possible”. During the bulk of its creation, Spychalski downgraded to a “dumb phone”. To make the album, the band – completed by guitarists Duc Peterman and Theo Spark, and drummer Andrei Martynchyk – decamped to the French countryside for a month, to a “crumbling, decadent, gothic old house surrounded by vineyards” where the only thing to do was create. At the start of that period, Spychalski lost his voice, “so I just read vociferously and really immersed myself in a few books which largely informed the world of the album – Revolutionary Demonology by this Italian occult philosophy collective called Gruppo di Nun, and a lot of Julian Evola, who’s a kind of early 20th-century spiritual fascist.”
Proudly intellectual (“I think that one of the reasons why guitar music is dying as a genre is because it assumes far too little of its audience,” suggests Spychalski) yet riddled with pithy one-liners, winks and the sort of pounding beats made for dark rooms and strobe lights, HMLTD’s work demands that it’s possible to be both serious and fun. “If I’m writing a song about vampires on New Year’s Eve or ketamine or cuckoldry, I’m trying to think, ‘OK, how can I work a reference to Wagner into this? How can I use this to talk about Hegel?’ I love high culture, and I love low culture. The only thing that I really abhor – which I think is the dominant cultural mode of our time – is mid-brow culture,” the frontman argues.
It’s this homogeneous levelling out of ideas that HMLTD are most repulsed by. “I’m not saying anything original here, but Instagram is destroying culture and destroying art more than we realise,” Spychalski states. Instead, ‘Fangs’’ Venn diagram of inspirations feels genuinely unique to its authors. ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ is like a Slavic Sweeney Todd: an uproarious knees-up born for the stage.
“People sometimes accuse us of trying to be cool, but if you listen to ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ then there’s no way that you can possibly level that accusation at us. I think what makes us good as a band is actually that willingness to put our neck on the line and be ready to receive ridicule,” Spychalski suggests. Meanwhile, ‘Close To You’ might be the only song in history that sounds like Crystal Castles but references The Carpenters. “Why do bats suddenly appear / Every time you are near?” goes one particularly amusing line.
There are happy hardcore songs about obsessive lust (‘Blitzkrieg’) and multiple lyrics that reflect how “masculinity is in a deep moment of crisis”. In just one verse of juddering opening track ‘What The Hell’, the frontman manages to reference Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, tennis star Maria Sharapova and the musical alter-egos of his bandmates, Skinship (Spark) and Saigon Fury (Peterman). HMLTD’s third is a record that will have you looking up reference points and going down information wormholes at every turn. It’s willfully, wildly curious, and it hopes the same for its listener.
“I am really proud to be a try-hard. I think that we all have to try really, really hard just to stay sane at the moment because the internet, and social media in particular, is destroying the western world from the inside out. It’s a cancer,” Spychalski says. “So I want my music to hopefully [open the door] to other ideas in the same way that a lot of the artists that I listened to growing up did for me. I discovered Albert Camus through The Cure song ‘Killing An Arab’; I discovered English new wave cinema through Morrissey. When artists introduce you to these other ideas, whatever they are, it becomes a gateway to a whole world beyond the music itself.” Step into the world of HMLTD and ‘Fangs’, and you’re in for one hell of a ride.
HMLTD’s ‘Fangs’ is out now via Lucky Number.
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