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It’s been over three years since all of our social media timelines were littered with “Harlem Shake” videos, but Baauer is still trying to distance himself from the viral hit.
“I hated it for a bit,” he told The Guardian this week. “It became me, that’s all I was. There was a long stretch of time where that’s all anyone would want to hear when I played gigs. I would purposefully not play it and sometimes I’d overhear people being like: ‘Fuck him, he didn’t even play it, that’s all anyone cares about.’ I’d be so bummed. It just got annoying.”
Today is his chance to prove he’s more than just the beneficiary of a weird Internet quirk that saw his song soundtrack gimmicky YouTube videos with millions of views. With the release of his debut album Aa, Baauer lets his abrasive trap drums do the talking. While several big names (including Future, Pusha T, and M.I.A.) appear on the project, he leaves those songs at the end of the tracklist, leaving no doubt he can hold his own over the entire first half of the album. Stream Aa below.
