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Daily Discovery is a feature that will highlight a new or recently discovered artist that we’re excited about. See the rest of our Daily Discoveries here.
There is music for the club, and there is music for the excellent new dive bar you discovered at 4 a.m. while you’re walking home drunk from the club. D.R.A.M.’s new project #1EPICSUMMER is the latter.
When you hear a song like “Cha Cha,” you might assume that Hampton, Virginia artist D.R.A.M. (pronounced drahm) stumbled on a disheveled hit, like he just struck gold with this perfect, random-ass balance of catchy melody and off-kilter, genre-defying style. If you made this assumption, you’d be wrong. D.R.A.M. made a whole project full of songs like this. None of them are glossy and perfect, and none of them are traditionally radio-friendly, but in a time when “Tuesday” is a legitimate hit, D.R.A.M.’s music makes perfect sense.
It’s fun, but D.R.A.M. has a serious side. There are party tracks and there’s zone-out music. There’s singing, there’s rapping, there’s that melodic flow that falls somewhere in between the two. And there’s a song about the cha-cha over a Super Mario World sample. But the great thing about it all is that no matter what D.R.A.M. is doing, he’s doing it with a charm and a knack for melody that makes #1EPICSUMMER one of the most addictive listens of the year so far. For the last two days, I’ve been singing about doing the cha-cha in a Latin bar, with a Dominican. I can’t help it. D.R.A.M.’s music is infectious.
“What the fuck is my purpose? Brain is lurkin’ / My mama mad I ain’t working, I feel worthless, but when I’m on stage and working I am perfect.”
On #1EPICSUMMER:
“The project initially came as a result from Gabe (of Sunny & Gabe) and I just working on music randomly. We started collaborating on beats and references at the beginning of this year. By the end of May, we already had a plethora of songs completed that were so different from one another in terms of genre classification.”
On the title of the project:
“The title comes from the amount of wholehearted fun I had during the entire season through music, mostly like the times I performed at these EPIC events that we’d have around the downtown Norfolk scene where people would leave overjoyed and out of breath from jumping around and catching the good vibes flowing around.”
On eclecticism:
“I definitely had the intention of making this project as eclectic as possible to showcase how far we can take the sound, but also to reach out to as diverse a crowd as possible. I want any and everyone to be able to grasp something from it. No matter if you listen to metal and play Destiny all day and night, if you’re in the streets providing by any means necessary, or if you’re an AARP card holder. We did this project for the entire world.”
On if he considers himself a rapper:
“I used to consider myself a rapper, although I’ve been singing since I could remember. But as time went on and I started to grow musically, I didn’t wanna hold myself to just that. The average person would probably write me off as a rapper if they never heard my shit.. To them, my presence screams ‘another trap rap hoodlum’ when that’s so not the case. It’s cool though, I like to catch people off guard.”
On songwriting:
“Songwriting definitely just comes naturally, man. It’s like I always have music going on in my head, even in a room full of silence. So it’s like, once a beat starts playing I can have something to it before the track ends. I just gotta make sure that voice memo is up and running so it can’t escape me. Haha, I love that shit though.”
What’s next?
“My plan from here on out is to get my music out there as far as humanly possible. I put on a hell of a show, and I want the whole world to experience that. From the stage, to the airwaves, all the way to your iPod. I’m ready to give it all I got.”
Listen to #1EPICSUMMER in full below. Download the whole thing for free here.
