Three summers ago, the shape-shifting musician quinn, then 17, was pacing around on the Lower East Side, posing for BeReals with geeked high schoolers. BeReal was a panopticon with a simple premise: reveal yourself, your true self, every day, for an audience. The caveat: a self is a sloppy thing, never as straightforward as taking a selfie. Strewn across the internet, quinn’s selves were like orphaned troublemakers—NTS mixes under dj weird bitch, jungle experiments under cat mother, ambient dispatches under feeler, aggro throwaways under rifleman. Somewhere behind all these fragments, there was a real, ridiculously talented person. Wherever you encountered her detritus, it mirrored the central tension of the BeReal era: “realness” as coherent identity, and “realness” as watching it collapse.
That day, quinn, born Quinn Dupree, was in New York for her first-ever show, which demanded she be “real” in a new way: physically present for people who knew her exclusively as a digital entity. When I listen to Before You Press Play, her cool new joint album with friend FearDorian, I’m reminded of that afternoon’s fun, anxious energy—balling out, but also trepidatiously becoming something. quinn and Dorian, 20 and 19 respectively, are sample-happy wunderkinds whose work probes, to varying degrees, the pressures and pleasures of getting older. In recent years, they’ve each ditched childhood homes for new apartments and become the faces of a burgeoning Atlanta rap movement. This new album is “fun,” quinn promised. That thrill comes with a catch: When you aren’t a kid anymore, fun is more complicated than it used to be.
With a simple premise—precocious producers link up again, this time for a full-length—Before You Press Play consolidates two complex palettes: FearDorian’s bleary-eyed hypnagogia on one end, quinn’s clipping, razor-edged rage on the other. As a memed-out kid, Dorian was heavy on vaporwave, and when it congeals with his chest-puffing punch-ins, it’s beautiful: Take the groggy “world pleaser,” which loads a hissy loop with flecks of whispered, slick-tongued flexes. (A favorite line gets its very own laugh track: “Kirk a nigga, put him on a shirt, ask him ’bout freedom then.”) The effect is studied and aspirational, like a Showbiz! song reimagined by James Ferraro. But if earlier quinn and Dorian solo material teems with relics of childhood—church services, movie snippets, voicemails from Mom—here they sometimes struggle to outgrow them. On “distance,” a cauldron of instrumental tension, Dorian quips: “I can’t be a family guy, bitch, I’m not Peter/I can’t be a family guy, bitch, I’m not Lois.” The way he says it—vocally and musically—is much more convincing than what he has to say: He’s trying so hard to sound grown that he winds up sounding childish.
Otherwise, the album is disarmingly simple, and often stronger for it. Most compelling are the moments where they find pockets in their loops: quinn runs laps around the rattling “so i don’t forget,” and when FearDorian eases into a disgusting flow on “burnt up,” you feel bad for whoever the hell he’s talking to. quinn and Dorian share an impressive inability to stick to a single sound: rarely does a quinn song end the way it begins, and FearDorian’s 35,000+ SoundCloud likes confirm his eclectic range—Bar Italia flip here, Tirzah rework there, a little TAGABOW on top. Before You Press Play poses a unique challenge, suited to artists in the process of planting roots in a real-world scene: tempering your own sprawling instincts to make space for someone else. When these friends accommodate one another, the casual, open-eared spirit of their budding hip-hop community starts to come into being.
