If you’ve been keeping up with this website, you probably know by now the recording studios in Atlanta are currently being overrun by vampire boys and futuristic girls, youth preachers and anarchic goblins, SoundCloud nerds and Magic City ready dope boys. Carving out a little lane of their own is ØWay, a supergroup of castaways big enough to fill every position on a baseball field. They might be the next hot thing for those who came of age with Young Thug leaks as if they were Judy Blume books.
As Thugger has gone the way of Sundays on HBO, we’re onto about the third generation of his evangelists assembling their swag out of his scraps. First there was Lil Baby and Gunna, turning his melodies into a radio rap format by ditching the idiosyncrasies. Then Lil Gotit and Lil Keed glommed onto the soulfulness. Up next is Tezzus and diamond*, the de facto captains of ØWay, who have taken the modern rapper’s scalpel to his jagged flows in a way that’s beyond straight mimicry. With Tezzus, he pulls from Thug’s sing-songy freakouts circa 1017 Thug, but with a cool, incredibly burnt voice. diamond* has got a gooey delivery that can work with any kind of production, but he’s best when he taps into the goofball loverboy of the Thug who sang “Twitter Song.” Together, they’re yin and yang, a tension that is the heart of their debut joint mixtape, UY SCUTI BØYS.
In the flesh, diamond* is to himself, with diamonds literally studded into his forehead. When I meet him at the studio of the tech company Untitled he’s looking out of a window with a hoodie covering his body like a blanket, waiting for Tezzus. “Sometimes I wait for him so long, I just go home,” he says. “He’s always busy with a girl or just being Tezzus.” Tezzus is implosively charismatic. When he arrives, I can hear him yelling “ØWay” ad-libs like a mating call from inside the elevator. Together, on the roof overlooking the East River in Greenpoint, they mostly talk about flying women in from Miami tonight and buying clothes. It’s a few weeks before their tape drops, which they dream will put them on in a big way. I’m following them along for the afternoon, trying to find the substance in an underground rap scene that’s almost entirely made of style.
Like a lot of the rappers to crop up in a post-Opium world, Tezzus and diamond* are dedicated to building their brand mythology. Tezzus sells me on his vision of ØWay as the “New Atlanta” hard, with a way of making things seem deeper than I see them. For example, one time he gave me a spiel about the meaning of ØWay having something to do with oppression, which sounded nice before I remembered roughly half of their music is about getting their dicks sucked (don’t fact check me).
That’s not really reflected heavily in their music, though. In fact, the appeal of the hit-or-miss stuff they’ve been dumping onto SoundCloud over the last few years is that it feels like a rough document of the road they’ve been on: Traveling around the country playing any show that will let them rock, slutting around, building their crew like the Dirty Dozen, getting fucked up, getting into fights, getting the clothes—by any means necessary—that will make them appear to be popping rappers before actually being popping rappers. Now, they’ve got the aesthetics—elaborate handshakes, outfits, slogans—and the co-signs (first YoungBoy and Carti, and now Thug in their corner like Joey LaMotta) to go with it. Still, it feels like they’re on a mission to beef up their blitzed lifestyle rap enough that it can stand apart from its influences while remaining true to the Atlanta rap lineage they grew up on. “It’s like being a part of the Byzantine Empire,” says Tezzus, staring intensely. “But we was born for this shit, we never wanted to be regular.”
