Lord Narf and Ethereal
© James North/Red Bull Content Pool
Music

A exhaustive guide to Atlanta's Awful Records

The US musical collective are transforming hip-hop and R&B with experimental electronics and minds wide open. Take a glimpse inside their world.
Written by Ian McQuaid
4 min readPublished on
In the space of a few years Awful Records have gone from a regional oddity to a global cult. They started out in Atlanta, formed from a rough nucleus of Father, KeithCharles Spacebar and Ethereal.
Living in each other’s apartments, the trio expanded into a loose, constantly running party, where friends would rock up and lay down beats and rhymes. Inspired by a love of European electronica as much as Atlanta’s exploding trap scene, the Awful Records sound formed – a mix of slippery lyrics that flipped between sex and depression and forward-looking rhythms that touched on everything from 808 boom to French electro to UK breakbeat science.
If I can’t move, then why would I put it out?
Father
Here’s a breakdown of the key Awful Records players.

Father

Awful’s nominal leader and wise-guy spokesman, Father blew up with his 2014 single Look At Wrist, a rap cut built from hypnotic repetition and throbbing, minimal bass. Since then he’s released three albums (Young Hot Ebony, Who’s Gonna Get F*cked First and I’m A Piece of S**t) and collaborated with pretty much everyone on the Awful roster.
Often heard rapping over his own beats, Father has created a lo-fi sound, with instrumentals built from a minimum of elements and recorded on his home laptop set-up. Tracks are regularly released with all the raw edges there on show – the main criteria for Father is that, even if he’s rapping about suicide and drug addiction, his music can still, somehow, make you want to dance. “I wanna be able to move to my own music,“ he points out. “If I can’t move, then why would I put it out?”

Abra

Awful’s first lady of soul, Abra combines an ethereal voice with her own distinct production skills. Her music takes the wine bar aesthetics of mid-'80s R&B stars such as Sade, and moves the sound to a stranger place, her basslines and drum machine rhythms beating with a hollow heart her vocals shot through with elegant loneliness. Debut album Rose is a perfect introduction to her sound, 11 tracks of weird R&B and dancefloor soul that sound both familiar and utterly fresh.
ABRA performs on the Red Bull Music Academy UK Tour 2015 at St John's Church in London.

ABRA

© James North/Red Bull Content Pool

Ethereal

Awful’s engine room, Ethereal runs a duel career as king-making producer and rapper in his own right. Having started out as a hip-hop producer, he claims that "experimenting with psychedelics "opened his eyes to wilder music, and he started firing out beat tapes of fractured jazz and frantic drum'n'bass rhythms, inspired by Squarepusher and Goldie. This electronica has then leaked back into his hip-hop production, probably best displayed on the submerged rave synths that defined his production Lost, the track that led to Playboi Carti linking up with A$AP Rocky.

KeithCharles Spacebar

KeithCharles is Awful’s resident loverman, a beatmaker and rapper who dedicates his laconic flow to women from round the world, veering between introspective reflexions on love – as on his most recent tune ILY2, punctuated with samples of girls confessing him their love – to straight up homages to sleaze.
The latter is probably best heard on the X-rated anthem Drink My Spit, where KeithCharles takes a vocal sample from notorious sex addict Rick James, and somehow manages to make James seem even more of a wrong ‘un.

Lord Narf

Lord Narf takes wavey hip hop and sends it spiralling out into the cosmos. Over the course of four EPs released between 2015 and now, she’s rhymed about flying spaceships, making booty calls, puking and lots and lots of smoking weed.
Working with regular collaborator (and fellow Awful family) Slug Christ, her music has got weirder and weirder the more she has released – their latest EP AutoYurnt, released in August, saw her vocals autotuned into an alien slur, lazing over beats that were slowed to a baroque, doom-laden sludge. The results are riddled with paranoia, off-kilter free associations, and flashes of bizarre inspiration.

Tommy Genesis

One of the few Awful members not to hail from Atlanta, the Vancouver based Tommy Genesis was discovered on Soundcloud, with Father repeatedly telling her to get her shit together and link up with them.
When she finally obliged, it became clear why Father had signed her. Genesis’s aesthetic easily slots into Awful’s, all wavy flow, themes of sex, boredom and drugs, impeccable style, and a love of music outside the typical hip-hop canon – she cites iconic punk band Suicidal Tendencies as a big influence. Her debut album World Vision mixed tracks built from aggressive rave synth lines with barely-there beats built from bass and clicks, and promised great things to come.
Awful Records, Blood Orange and Kilo Kish come together for a showcase in Hackney's historic St John's Church on Thursday October 20 as part of the RBMA UK tour. Buy tickets.
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