On landmark releases like Veteran, his seminal 2018 debut on Deathbomb Arc, and Scaring The Hoes, his new mission with Danny Brown out at present, JPEGMAFIA has made a reputation for himself by his unconventional manufacturing type, a sound that has turn out to be synonymous with scouring the web’s deepest crevices. Similar to an ambient artist that intertwines subject recordings with their hushed tones to create a fragile environment, Peggy builds soundscapes out of obscure audio clips and samples that exist purely inside our on-line world. Veteran spotlight “Real Nega” reworks Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s creaky vocal fry to pair the popcorning, operatic baritone with lyrics that wage conflict in opposition to the alt-right. Scaring The Hoes lead single “LEAN BEEF PATTY” pitches up Ginuwine and Mario Winans’ singing on Diddy’s “I Need A Girl (Pt. 2)” to create a chipmunk-soul snippet that diverts your consideration from the bellowing 808s and the crunchy, distorted bassline.

“I really want to make something that tears you out of yourself,” JPEGMAFIA proclaims. There’s no aggressive drive, per se, until the competitors is the archetypal battle of man vs. himself. Peggy expounds, “I want to master my domain. I have a domain in experimental hip-hop that is my own. I’ve created a lane that’s just my own, and I want to double down and set myself in stone. This is my thing. You can’t do this thing.” And Peggy’s proper; his type is an idiosyncratic archive of his web search historical past. By stacking every music with plenty of totally different micro melodies, mixing jittery BPMs with sonic maximalism, Peggy creates a digital sound collage which may finest be described as hyperrap.

Pulling from the chaos of hyperpop and the meticulous craftsmanship of pop music, Scaring The Hoes is an ode to hip-hop that exists as a testomony to the style’s vary and influences. In an age the place hip-hop is essentially the most consumed style of music within the United States, Peggy acknowledges that modern-day pushback is the instinctual response to timeless efforts. “Pop music is the music that’s going to get hated on in real time,” Peggy says. “Look at TikTok – all of this shit is pop music from the 2000s that people said was trash. I was alive back then. All them motherfuckers said those songs was trash. Every last one of them songs the kids love right now, they were saying, ‘Shit’s trash. Get it off the radio. Play the underground shit.’” At the age of 33, JPEGMAFIA has generational expertise navigating the cyclical developments of pop music, and tradition as an entire. He posits, “It’s the most current thing you can make of the day, and that’s why it ages better than any other kind of music.”

Scaring The Hoes is the pure evolution of JPEGMAFIA’s experimental hip-hop, conjoining his method with conventional rap fundamentals, from turntablism and DJ scratches to developing an album totally made on a hip-hop artifact: the Roland SP-404. Inspired by the Madvillainy periods — wherein Madlib solely used a turntable, a number of vinyl, a tape deck, and a Boss SP-303 sampler to create the cult traditional — Peggy challenged himself to make use of just one machine. His 404 grew to become a logo of his resourcefulness, an homage to Madlib and J Dilla and all the nice beatmakers that got here earlier than him.

Exclusively utilizing his Roland SP-404, Peggy labored to supply a mission that’s equally progressive as it’s tantalizing. He met up with Danny Brown behind closed doorways for recording periods over the course of the 12 months, with Brown selecting from a number of beats produced with him in thoughts. Eventually, Scaring The Hoes naturally remodeled from an album primarily based on Henning Schellerup’s 1973 Blaxploitation movie Sweet Jesus, Preacherman into an expansive demonstration of the pair’s chemistry. Nothing is off limits. Ski Mask The Slump God’s “BabyWipe” slips into the beat change of “God Hates Ugly” earlier than swiftly reducing to the jubilant gospel of a church choir; “Run The Jewels” is a howling trumpet solo, tensely restrained by the participant’s trumpet mute; “Garbage Pail Kids” is a haunting youngsters’s tune mutated alongside a closely distorted electrical guitar, nearing the suggestions of shoegaze.

The collaboration with Brown was a no brainer for JPEG: “I approached Danny because – shit, Kanye’s a Nazi now, so he’s my #1 rapper at this point.” Always an earnest scholar of hip-hop, Peggy had been watching Danny carry out since he was about 20: “He didn’t even know who the fuck I was.” The Scaring The Hoes periods would have appeared like a pipe dream to a younger Devon Hendryx (not even JPEGMAFIA at that time). “I would bring him shit and we would lock in for a week, I would leave and go work on it, then I would bring it back like, ‘This is what it sounds like, here’s some new shit,’ and we’d keep going,’” Peggy reminisces. After roughly a 12 months of periodically working collectively, the mission was lastly marked full with the stamp of a five-word tweet this previous Feb. 10: “THE DANNY COLLAB IS FINISHED.”

By embracing the taunts of chronically on-line white incels, Scaring The Hoes goals for legacy over mass appeasement. Peggy laughs as he explains the title: “People say that shit about my music. Any music that isn’t basic and normal and completely formulaic is going to be put in that category. It’s a phrase originated by n****s that don’t get pussy.” The title is a cheeky assertion in direction of white criticism of Black artwork: “Take away one little thing you can say about us and now you have to talk about the music.”

Almost seven years after his solely collaborative mixtape, The Second Amendment with Freaky, JPEGMAFIA has his eyes set on coalition-building inside hip-hop’s underground and its impartial voices. Peggy clarifies, “I had this idea, I wanted to unite the underground. You look at all the mainstream dudes and they all make songs together. Every album’s got a Lil Baby feature, Lil Durk feature, Future feature. All these n****s work together, they get money together and they come up together and they give each other strength. It’s like a spirit bomb.” After years of creating artwork for the sake of artwork and watching his music be reproduced on the web by followers and friends alike, Peggy questions the unnecessary division: “Bigger artists pillage from what we’re doing, so why do we gatekeep it?”

JPEGMAFIA is proud to be unequivocally himself. He’s proud to be an “independent, creative Black man who is doing literally whatever the fuck he wants.” Take away the success and Peggy continues to be the identical individual. In a bleak second of reflection, Peggy delineates: “Ideally I would like people to see me as someone who’s good at what he does, someone who respects his craft, and someone who takes care of his business. But I understand, in this day and age, being Black and being good at what you do is just not enough. It’s not entertaining enough for white incel teens online, so I understand that this is not how I’ll ever be perceived until I probably die.” He refuses to sugarcoat. He refuses to accommodate your entitled requests. He refuses to censor himself. JPEGMAFIA solely has one request: “Ultimately, no matter what you say about me, just say the beats were hard. Just don’t forget that.”

Scaring The Hoes is out now on PEGGY/AWAL.