Cropping Up: Dewey Bryan & Earoh

CROPPING UP is an interview series designed to introduce CABBAGES readers to talented hip-hop artists on the rise.

For this edition, I caught up with the Los Angeles-based duo of DEWEY BRYAN & EAROH. (You may already know the former as graphic designer Dewey Saunders, who's done cover art and more for the likes of Anderson Paak. and Future.) Just last week, the pair dropped their full length debut Beach Burners, with guest appearances by Blu, Chuck Inglish, and lojii, among others.

While you currently live out in Los Angeles, your rap career goes back to your time in Philadelphia as Dewey Decibel. What prompted you to switch coasts and change your moniker?

Dewey Bryan: The name is the spin on my actual government name, so it's just a return to form. The Dewey Bryan artist development happened in L.A., so that seasoned me. I have a Philly backbone, but the lyrics are all pulled from L.A. experiences. To take it two steps further back, I'm from South Florida, so being a Philly cat never clicked in all the way. The music I was making was so tropical like Florida or California. When I came out here, everything almost started to fall in place more. I love all the work that I did in Philly, but at the same time I was almost like a fish out of water, because I'm just a beach dude. 

Art really brought me out to L.A, and the whole Malibu wave with Anderson [Paak.] and the Free Nationals and subsequently working with Chronixx. There was so much motion afforded by the artwork at the time that I was having FOMO of being in Philly and seeing all of these events that I did the work for transpiring. It wasn't mandatory that I move to LA, but it certainly was good for my career arc, because after that I ended up working with Turnstile, Future, and a number of other mainstream artists.

The funny thing is when Anderson hit me up to do Malibu, I shelved a project that I was working on. That was some of my best stuff at the time, but I really had to choose between the two lanes to devote my time and energy to, one path that was going to have some kind of return in an actual career. So the music thing slowly drifted into the leaves like the Homer Simpson gif, but the flame never really died. I learned what it was like to be an indie artist by doing the artwork for all these artists; I learned what it was like to do a mainstream rollout. I entered the music industry through the back door, through design, and I don't think I would've made it this far through my underground rap path in Philly.

Beach Burners has this very curated sonic and thematic feel. How did the two of you develop this conceptual, inspirational space around the project?

Dewey Bryan: The Beach Burners cinematic universe is kind of based on all these goofy '90s movies that we really liked that were shot in L.A. like Point Break. We started bonding on stupid movies, even like Captain Ron and Club Paradise. These things started to inform where we're pulling from. Not only is the music really sample-based, a lot of the thinking and conceptual strategy is really all these things from the '90s that we liked. The sound design that Earoh and I developed together, in a way, is still based on these late night infomercials, this weird fake advertising reggae, smooth jazz, things I always was attracted to as a kid in South Florida. The Southern California lifestyle definitely infused what we were thinking just from living out here. It's pool water and palm trees, so naturally that's going to go into the music. 

Earoh: Dewey has such a breadth of background in music, so he loves all different kinds of sounds. He talks about Kenny G a lot, so there's a lot of sax samples, a lot of really loose, wailing samples. And that type of thing always would make me think of those commercials and those infomercials. It's almost like you're pairing those worlds. It's like, if I'm sitting at late night watching TV, what would some of the sounds literally in the commercials be? Then you extract those elements and you try to build out a bigger world from it, throwing a lot of convention to the wind and trying, sometimes, the cheesiest idea sonically musically and seeing if we can make that dope.

Many of the Beach Burners influences you cite, including smooth jazz, have historically been laughed off. Knowing this negative perception exists, how do you fight against that as artists?

Dewey Bryan: The vocal to me is what makes it not cheesy or corny. If you think about an artist like Roc Marciano, it's dope when he rhymes over any kind of beat. He is the anchor and he's so monotone that it's just dope whatever he does. Earoh comes from a little bit of a different place, but he understood exactly what I was going for. And the album is really interesting because it sounds very timeless to me and you kind of can't place it. Maybe it came from 1998.

Earoh: How we keep the purity of it and the confidence and the integrity is just making the strong product. The quality control is really fleshed out. That's kind of also where the executive production comes in from Rick Friedrich. He was really the one to say, in the mixing stages and the post-production stages, like, hey, let's take this out or we really need to add something. Having a third party to add that editorial insight to it also helps to make sure we're dialed in on the quality. 

Dewey Bryan: It was a major label process. It went through six mixing stages and we went through with a fine tooth comb. We were taking really extensive notes and going back and forth. Everything in there is a decision that we all made together. There wasn't one argument and we must have smoked like a quarter pound of weed in Philly.

Even beyond the music itself, you've got this corresponding merch drop that adds to it. How did your design experience play a role in the aesthetics surrounding the album's release?

Dewey Bryan: Coming off of a fresh three-year stint as design director for Nylon Magazine, that was an experience that got my design skills to a really high level. That, plus the experience I had working with artists in the industry and seeing what they needed for a rollout, made me think about rollouts differently. And I was like, since all the design is in-house, how can we do the most maximum rollout ever? The time we were afforded gave us the chance to make a coconut-scented candle that smells like the album sounds. I developed the merch pretty early on in the game. [There's] a zine called Lifestyle Dealer, which is the motto for everything, like we're dealing in illegal music and the music is contraband. If you watch the "Buzzin" video, that's really literally displayed. Chuck Inglish is in there buying a bag from me. 

For the design side, I went through all these vintage surf magazines that I've been collecting for years and pulled out inspiration of the type and color palettes, the way the '80s and '90s felt. That was the vibe we were going for with the album. To make more specificity in the timeline, we chose surf culture and vintage surf magazines to tie the Beach Burners aesthetic into it. So conceptually it's almost like a Ken doll; it's so basic, it's just beach. But we took it so deep and we made all these stories about being outlaws on the coastline. Then for the typography, I reached out to a really cool designer and opened up my world so that it looked a little bit different than my usual stuff. The collage work was something that I really leaned into and it was easy for me, my personal style. But we reframed that style into the Beach Burners' lens and really worked with all this surf imagery and gradients and really upscale photography. While working at Nylon, I realized that to create a brand, all of these things have to work together and make sense together. Basically it's an extreme version of the Malibu rollout.

Earoh: It's opened up so much world building and also just the opportunities for more creativity between us specifically. We can sit down and get busy on some music or cut up some collages. We can create together really, really easily. I have great friends, other great partners, and some of those things don't always happen. So to have somebody, not only your homie, but also you can get busy and create with, it's special. I intend to keep feeding that, in whatever form it takes. We're both really agile and also just understand things change. So I think overall we will continue to add to this Beach Burners ethos, for sure. 

Dewey Bryan: This thing is almost like a movie, in a way, but we're just working within our budget. 

Gabe 'Nandez & Preservation, Sortilège

(buy it / stream it)

New York-based rapper Gabe 'Nandez has worked with plenty of dope beatmakers, including Tony Seltzer and Wino Willy. But with Preservation, the masterful producer behind modern classics Days With Dr. Yen Lo with Ka and billy woods' Aethiopes, he achieves something extraordinary on proverbial wax. His most cerebral work to date, Sortilège conjures the divine as it side-eyes some of life's somatic concerns. Starting with "Spire," a tapestry of organ swirls and tremulous percussion, his cadence and tone have never sounded quite so DOOM-esque, though topically he's exploring a fairly different realm than the masked villain did. That continues into "Shadowstep," where Golden Age-derived drum patterns augment fluid lyrics about destiny and race, followed by the bellicose elbow throws of "Muay Sok" and the protective yet descriptive "Bascinet." His ability to blend casual streetwise asides in with contemplative expressions on cuts like "Ball & Chain" and the Koncept Jack$on aided "Hierophant" suggests a warrior poet's spirit lurks within, something Preservation's taste in samples naturally supports. And speaking of guests, the aforementioned woods makes two appearances here, first shattering illusions on "War" and then plotting revolutionary acts alongside Armand Hammer's ELUCID amid the kosmische synth fog of "Mondo Cane."

Nakama., EVERYTHING BURNS!

(buy it / stream it)

A standout presence on 2023's Algiers x King Vision Ultra mixtape SHOOK WORLD, rapper Nakama. (mind the period, pls) ranks among NYC's most interesting underground hip-hop artists. Working closely with collaborator PRIM, he demonstrates on EVERYTHING BURNS! precisely why more heads ought to know what he's up to. Throughout this exciteable half-hour outing (a noticeable bit longer if you opt for Bandcamp buy-in), his versatility as a vocalist never ceases to impress. The aggressive and glitchy "No Flats." snarls and bites before blissfully devolving under granular synthesis, while the comparatively beauteous "Blkboyjoy." unravels ugly truths and generational traumas with enlightenment as its aim. Attuned to the sorts of beats underpinning his city day-to-day, he deftly deconstructs drill on "Iverson Numbers.," "Next Dance.," and "We Lost The Choir." with inventive verses and deliveries. Towards the end, things get even more chaotic, with the degeneratively noisy pair "Uncomfortably Close." and "Hunting Season." barely bottling the tension before "My Turn." wraps with galloping rhythms and brisk rhymes.

Three new tracks to snack on...

Pro Dillinger & Futurewave, "Scarface"

OldBoy Rhymes, "Rage (feat. Ariano)"

Erg One & BoneWeso, "THEHIGHEXALTED"