“I make Queens look like Kyoto,” promises Kuru, a small-time rapper hailing from the DMV-area hyperpop scene. An early report from a college blog describes Kuru as incorporating “an astonishingly wide variety of sounds, from bass-heavy drill hip-hop up to light, melodic, and playful hyperpop” and rapturously describes the plucky 17-year old as a rising peer of “xaviersobased, quinn, blackwinterwells, and midwxst.” These days, Kuru can be found in Ridgewood, where he told me he’s “staying out here for a little bit because my friend who grew up in Flushing moved here and needed a roommate.”
His latest single, called “I saw it coming,” is out via deadAir, the same indie label that’s pushing Jane Remover and another Brooklyn hyperpop act who goes by dazegxd; Kuru, Jane Remover and a few other hyperpop affiliates appear in a recent promotional video shot by the music blog Pitchfork, inside the nearby, Instagram-thirsty skating rink Xanadu, which opened last year in Bushwick, where Kuru was playing one of his first shows since moving to the city. It’s hard not to hear Kuru trying to find his space in all this; under a minute and a half of video game music and largely squealed rap bars that seem to foggily distinguish Kuru from, say, Glaive.
In the clip for “I saw it coming,” Leo Reimer shoots Kuru rapping from the swing sets of nearby Rosemary’s Playground — a grassy corner of the small Queens neighborhood that dates to 1962 and is currently in the midst of expansive renovations. Nearby, a member of his posse moves up and down aggressively on a swing set while Kuru hush-raps bars about smoking vapes and moving to a new city, promising to “die before I move back.” My favorite one is when he rattles “they ain’t shinin’ as much as the Geek Bar, I just scored a goal like Neymar but that won’t rhyme so I’ll say Neemar.”
Reimer’s digital shots feel insistently grey, turning a neighborhood of small, colorfully bricked apartment buildings into a rivetingly bleak semi-exurban landscape, like something out of a James Grey movie. In another shot, the group are gathered in front of one of the park’s rarely-used chess tables and pose incongruously there; later, they reappear at an Orange Fitness in a mall and then outside a hair salon in Flushing, continuing the minute-long theme of movement in the outerboros. We should have seen it coming.
In another recent music video, the local duo of Marilu Donovan (experimental harpist) and Adam Markiewicz (singer and former member of the Dreebs, “which Pitchfork called ‘the best kept secret in New York City,’” according to his website) appear inside an apartment in Ridgewood, re-recording “Corners,” a song from I Forget Everything, an EP they put out last year as LEYA. The pair have been around the local scene for a while, having released some three albums worth of material under the name since 2018. Darren Cunningham, the celebrated techno DJ from the UK who puts out records as Actress, has even recorded a version of one of LEYA‘s harp-forward records.
The group are on NNA Tapes, which also puts out OHYUNG and other figures performing in the neighborhood’s vaguely experimental scene, so I had been happily alerted to the its latest move to release a “rework” of one of the song’s from last year’s EP. They had circulated it over to Shane Lavers, who puts out music himself under the sobriquet Chanel Beads, songs that sound like hazy dreampop blurs of synths, playing distantly in a half-empty empty bar on a weekend afternoon. His touch gives Donovan’s prickly harp music a kind of warm coherence, pumping in violins and beats that makes the song feel more urgent and makes Markiewicz’s largely undiscernible singing feel important. He appears in the video, not unlike a hyperpop rapper, brooding in a black hoodie.
It’s interesting that Ridgewood is becoming a somewhat newish centerpoint for this kind of edge culture, at any rate. Despite the neighborhood’s pointedly reserved quietude, or perhaps because of it, there’s something bursting at the seems of these endless brick two story apartment buildings , a kind of infectiously smooth electronic sound that remains thoroughly untamed and buzzing vaguely in the direction of Queens.
No less an authority than Sophie Kemp, a debut novelist from nearby Brooklyn, declared last year that Lavers is “associated with the much-maligned lower Manhattan micro-neighborhood of Dimes Square,” so it feels fitting that he’s also now here too, at least for a moment. In the video, overlaid with a kind of SALEM-style font aesthetic, the group are shot jumping up and down, somewhat ominously, not unlike Kuru and his posse. “The video was a classic DIY effort fueled by wine, bailey’s, and a bunch of weed, shot by the homies. It was all very wholesome, weird, and fun,” Donovan and Markiewicz collectively tell me through their publicist.
Top image taken from kuru’s “i saw it coming.”
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