Earthgang: the Atlanta cult duo is back with a new album and high-profile collaborations

Earthgang: The Afrofuturist hip-hop of the Atlanta duo

In Atlanta, it’s just another day… The capital city of the New South still sees dozens of children flooding its streets when school ends. They play hopscotch, jump rope, fight over nothing and rob the local sweet shop. Leaning out of their window, Olu Dakarai and Eian Parker notice that almost all the kids in the neighbourhood are black. And like all innocent schoolboys, they’re also gazing at every sedan with XXL rims that drive boldly on the boulevard. Everyone dreams of owning a car like that.

The two men are everything but envious. After all, they’ve succeeded in life, haven’t they? They weren’t even 20 years old when these two students, who shared a common passion for jazz, yoga and zany samples of MF Doom, founded the duo Earthgang and disappeared under the alias Olu and WowGr8 in 2008. Their debut EP, The Better Party, was released two years later in 2010. It was followed by two mixtapes and a fabulous, first underground hip-hop album, Shallow Graves For Toys (2015), which should be listened to on high-quality speakers with the volume on full blast.

The tone is set. Their music will always be a playground inspired by their childhood. For years, Olu and WowGr8 have fashioned anachronistic hip-hop sounds coming straight out of films like Dune or The Fifth Element, and regularly borrowed their controlled extravagance from Outkast. Using synthesizers and megaphone-filtered vocals, Earthgang highlights the bruises of a fractured America and claims its affiliations with Afrofuturism, a literary and artistic movement that explores the intersection of African and Afro-American cultures with different elements of SF in the 1970s.

Numéro: Your music is so rich that it sometimes seems abstract…

Earthgang: It’s a kind of distant nebula, a tetrahedron as messy as the real world. We left school at a very early age, without warning. It was as if our favourite uncle had come to get us out of the blue and shouted, “Come on, let’s get out of here!” Everything in our lives has led us to this music.

Pharrell Williams, Damon Albarn, Little Dragon… the star-studded cast on the album Perfect Fantasy

Nominated at the Grammy Awards in 2020 for ‘Best Rap Performance’ with Down Bad featuring J. Cole, JID, Bas and Young Nudy, and once again in 2021 for ‘Best R’n’B Song’ with Collide featuring Tiana Major9, the Atlanta duo didn’t win the coveted prize. Perhaps they’ll have another chance with their fifth record, Perfect Fantasy, released on October 29th, 2024.

The album features a host of stars including Damon Albarn, the charismatic frontman of British band Gorillaz, Swedish band Little Dragon, Snoop Dog, T-Pain and Pharrell Williams. Of course, most of the tracks feature members of Spillage Village, a collective founded by Olu and WowGr8 in 2010, whose members include singer Mereba and rappers JID and 6lack.

Most of the tracks on this new opus were written during the pandemic. Earthgang’s aim? To eliminate unnecessary material in order to be more effective, more punchy, and to try new things. As for the album cover, it represents their love for gaming as a nostalgic token of their younger years, when creativity was still free and unrestrained.

Numéro: What’s the hardest thing to deal with in the music industry? 

Earthgang: The algorithm, man. The algorithm.

Numéro: What do you mean by that?

Earthgang: It never moves towards art. It’s crucial to share your music on social media, yet why would we put everything on a platform that isn’t even really designed for music? We live in frustrating times. You find yourself competing for the attention of people who are posting content about dogs or renovating cars. This morning, we learned how to create a huge drum on social media, for no reason at all… and the worst thing is, we thought it was really cool.

Perfect Fantasy by Earthgang, available now.

Traduction Emma Naroumbo Armaing.