Social media has changed the way we interact with our favourite artists. More than just musicians, they’re now personalities, people we can interact with on the daily. Now more than ever we’re aware that musicians are pretty normal people, they just have a weird job. Every week we get to know one of our favourite SoundCloud heroes, internet dating style, in our new column, Internet Crush.
Trap comes in many forms these days. Where once artists like Waka Flocka Flame were the template; aggressive and in your face, the genre has opened up in recent years and the xaned-out dreams of Travis Scott and Future have made for more emotional and expressive trap music. GASHI belongs to this new school, born in Libya to Albanian parents and but raised in Brooklyn he’s a rapper with more death than first meets the eye.
Like Flocka, his vocal style is aggressive, his choice of beats bombastic and his visuals fit the template, grills, sunglasses and stunting like there’s no tomorrow, however, listen to the lyrics and there are moments of real rawness. On the hook recent single ‘Used To Be’ he screams “every night I pop another pill to sleep / they keep saying there ain’t nothing wrong with me”, it’s delivered like a brag, devoid of emotion thanks to the autotune laid over the top but it betrays an emotional honesty that crops up again and again in GASHI’s work.
Today he drops new single ‘1134’, a lower-key, moody cut that takes trap’s penchant for autotune and dials it up to almost Bon Iver levels. In honour of the release, we got to know GASHI for this week’s Internet Crush.
