- The Oakland rapper teams up with Cassius Select for a jolt of club-ready rhythm—dancehall for brutalist concrete spaces.
- DÆMON's work thrives in the gray areas between genres, lending it an uncanny futurism. Sometimes that's in the music, like the juxtaposition of his deadpan spoken word raps over twisting, metallic club tracks on 2018's ÆOS. Elsewhere it's in his visuals, like the video for "Big Business," which soundtracks a digitally-rendered Western mining town where the residents glitch, stutter and loop while going about their pre-programmed lives. This outsider approach is even baked into his community. He's the only rapper on i8i, the record label tied to Utah-based art collective Final Hot Desert, who are known for confrontational live shows and abstract electronic releases that sound like transmissions from some unexplored outer rim.
Last year's JUICE, made in collaboration with producers Modulaw and Xzavier Stone, cast the vocalist in a new light—this time he was under the glare of frenetic trap beats that shifted between a chopped-and-screwed tempo and the pacey rush of nightcore. His vocals, too, underwent heavy manipulation, drenched in effects and stretched into something more textural and alien than human.
On his latest EP, Cycles Of Night, DÆMON teams up with Canadian producer Cassius Select, who's built a reputation around his own particular brand of dark garage-inspired club music. Cycles Of Night shapes the producer's angular sound design into a slower dancehall-indebted style. Its beats don't bump so much as slink, giving DÆMON more space to alternate between jittery whispers and sensuous croons in his newfound vocal style.
"Cero" and "Sincerely" come on strong, with sparse, angular drums and sinister basslines—dancehall for brutalist concrete spaces. But on the back half of the EP, the pair take a gentler approach. "Breach"'s warm ] pads blanket the listener as a raspy DÆMON beckons to "come closer," while on "Honey Pt. I & II", he coos over woozy pianos, finding a strange sense of intimacy in its web of icy production. While DÆMON and Cassius Select's music may sit at the experimental edge of the club music sphere, Cycles Of Night is imbued with an undeniably human quality and a sense of pop accessibility—placing it in another gray area that makes DÆMON's singular shapeshifting persona all the more captivating.
Tracklist01. Cero
02. Sincerely
03. Breach04. Honey Pt. 1 & 2