curtisy & owin tell me about the best Irish rap project of the year so far

Curtisy & Owin put out the brilliant Get A Life! earlier in the year, a short but absolutely packed release that marks Gav's third full-length in as many years, seeing him paired with more colourful, playful production and breaking out of the loops that defined much of his earlier work. The looser, more ambitious production seems to give a lot more air to Gav's lyricism as well - playfully riffing on pop rap on the opening track Talk of the Town and moving almost mournfully at its close on Couch Springs. But it's the album's shining centrepiece, Sonny, which draws from the likes of Tyler, The Creator with its blooming strings and live drums where he gives his best work yet. There's only two features: Lil Skag operating at what might be his peak so far across three tracks - including that phenomenal opener - and Emily Beattie who we absolutely will get to later in the interview; yet the album still feels like a moment for Irish music as a whole, and the wider community around it.

Six days after the album dropped, Fourth Best ran the album front to back in The Big Romance and had a chat about the week that was. One thing was crystal clear in the days after the album release: everyone who was paying attention was 100% behind him.

Curtisy: “It's been amazing. getting some messages that would make a grown man cry, and have made a grown man cry. It's been really rewarding; this whole week I've been doing no thinking, I'm just basking in it right now. People really seem to enjoy it, but the people who don't like it, they're not going to text me and say it to me, bro...”

Owin: “Well, there was that one in the comments.”

Curtisy: “Some fella commented on the Sonny video saying 'terrible and smelly-looking'. I deleted it, I goes 'fuck off'. We're all just trying to spread positivity, Get A Life, the hand print and all that.”

Fourth Best: “Was that actually the whole concept with Get A Life?”

Curtisy: “The concept of the album to me... oh shit. I was going to say 'it's deeper than rap' out loud. It's meta. Making the album is the whole concept of the album.

Like I was going to London, he was coming here… We were going back and forth, living experiences, getting on the tube for the first time… Living a little bit. Even if the music isn’t about going out and spreading positivity and shaking an elderly woman’s hand.”

Owin: “It’s nice that when me and Gav did get to the studio, the last thing we were doing was the music. It was always like two or three hours of conversations about life. We don’t get to see each other all that much… Get A Life was us saying ‘fuck, all we do is this music thing’; it’s not always the purpose of us meeting. We’ve been bros, but we’ve gotten closer by making this and now we’re saying ‘damn, we need to do something other than this. we need to get a fucking life.’

Fourth Best: “Gav, this is like your third record in two years, you did one with Hikii; in the past you’ve done EPs with the like of D*mp and Tape Eater, is the producer collab something you seek out?”

Curtisy: “Yeah, that’s crazy, I forgot I locked in like that with some of those guys… I like that I get real locked in with a friend. I pick a friend and say ‘yeah, we’re the fucking guys right now’.

This aligned with Owin saying ‘I want to make some music’, and we ended up making those first three songs. And it’s like ‘oh shit! we should just keep making music!’. Then you have seven songs and why wouldn’t we make it a project? That’s how things happened with Hikii too. And like, me and D*mp were just drinking so much we just ended up accidentally making music.

[Me and Owin] just kept making good songs, but they’re over a long period of time. Like, [Get A Life tune] The Instigatior, we made that at the same time we did Lower Your Hopes [from What Was The Question?]”

Fourth Best: “Were there like, specific influences and ideas you were looking at from the start here? Like, did you set out knowing you wanted to make something like Surf Gang were up to?”

Owin: “Some of it was conscious, some of it was just that me and Gav have very similar tastes. Someone like Earl is a real on the nose reference, his record Sick! was a big influence”

Curtisy: “But you’re allowed to do two things! Just because I’m doing stuff like, Tell Me I’m Good or Sonny or Couch Springs doesn’t mean the whole album needs to sound like that.”

Owin: “Finding the middle grounds was important. Like, Sonny isn’t a song that’s in that Surf Gang lane or super sad-boy, Earl kind of lane.”

Curtisy: “Action Bronson is someone who comes up in my head a lot when I think about the connection between me and you. Tell Me I’m Good especially is a real aloha moment, so sunny and breezy. Honestly, when I have the aux around you, I’m like I could play some Action Bronson right now; I played Easy Rider and you went ‘huh!’.

We have similar taste but different inspirations… We made a Get A Life inspiration playlist and I added two songs but you had like Adrianne Lenker in there and I don’t even know who Adrianne Lenker is… no I’m joking. But I’ve never taken inspiration from such outward things to make this shit. You taught me to listen to Bernie Mac if I want to be inspired to rap, or listen to some bullshit to draw from it.

Adrianne Lenker is not bullshit, though.”

Fourth Best: “First track on the album is a Drake flip. How did that come about?”

Curtisy: “That’s not a Drake flip!”

Owin: “It’s not! I would never flip Drake. So many of the songs have different titles on my laptop and that one was called Profanity Kane for the longest because I originally wanted to make something inspired by Making The Band (Danity Kane).

First time I shared that with somebody was I showed it to Half Pipe, it didn’t go as hard as I thought it would, and it was in a different state by the time it made it to Gav.

But I genuinely don’t listen to Drake ever. If you put a gun to my mother’s head and told me to name five Drake songs I’d look at my mother and say ‘I love you. I’m so sorry.’”

Curtisy: “That horn sound’s really similar though, so I was just jokingly rapping that Drake shit in my head. The second I start writing some music and I’m having fun; I feel like a fucking one-year-old. It doesn’t matter if something’s going to be considered copycat. It’s just getting out what’s happening in my head right now.

We had a really bad version of that tune for like two years. You get drunk, you get to the afters, we’d play it and people would go ‘this is sick’ but it just wasn’t sick. 

When we went back to it, we did it justice. We didn’t rip off some shit…”

Owin: “That’s on Alex.”

Curtisy: “People think I’m singing but I’m the lowest voice in that chorus. Alex Gough is doing all the heavy lifting there, and he did production.”

Owin: “He played drums on Sonny as well, but for Talk of the Town… The chorus wouldn’t have sounded so on the nose if we left it the way it was, because it was so bad! Alex making it sound professional made it sound more like something that Drake could make.

If you reference the rap lyrics, it’s an homage, but Alex being able to sing properly and harmonise and build a chorus was actually like, oh shit.”

Fourth Best: “You mentioned the Danity Kane track there, and now obviously Earl is doing a full record of the Surf Gang stuff…”

Curtisy: “I could do without being the Earl guy. Like I do like it to an extent that people relate me to the guy I love the most in the world.”

Owin: “If you showed the music to someone outside of Ireland, they wouldn’t compare it to Earl, but Ireland has such a small population that you stand out in that lane. If you showed it to some Spanish guy he’d just say it’s some weird sad rap.”

Fourth Best: “I was just talking to Rory Sweeney and he said you’re closer to someone like Yeat than Earl funnily enough.”

Curtisy: “Goat. And I like that; it’s probably where I land. Lucki did the shit, he started out as Lucki Ecks making the hippity-hoppity shit and now he’s on drugs and making the best music of all time. I wanna be on drugs, man.

I want to experiment a lot. I don’t feel cool doing the same thing twice. It doesn’t stop anywhere. I love Yeat, I listen to the likes of Yeat and Lucki more than Earl, rap with auto-tune.

Fourth Best: “On the way down here I was listening to Gav Curtis - All Of The Lights…”

Curtisy: “Started this shit. Back then I was way more into the likes of Lil B, crazy little guys. I’m leaning into my lyricism way more though.”

Fourth Best: “What’s it like to put out a record while you’re getting a hundred comments on Mideval Times every day?”

Curtisy: “Crazy. It’s a weird little thing where every day people are giving hate! This video is not a real video! This is not an outfit. We got out of the car and stood here and jumped around, we’re trying to have fun as human beings. People are like, this isn’t rap. We know this isn’t rap. We’re trying something crazy right now.”

Owin: “Tell Diplo that.”

Curtisy: “Fuck Diplo. But I’d love some of the views on our shit. Every single day, Mideval Times, ‘This shit’s the new Yuno Miles’… Fuck you and fuck Yuno Miles. We made some music that I cry at.”

Fourth Best: “What was the change in process that let a tune like Sonny come around, where it’s way more complex and dynamic than a lot of the beats that we’ve seen Gav on before?”

Owin: “Sonny was never supposed to be that. That was a very happy accident. We had the first half with the sample, and the second part of that tune was probably the last thing we made for the whole album.

Knxwledge is a massive guy for me, and originally, I had those crushed compressed drums over the sample, and at some point we had a split where we had the sample and then the drums… I don’t know what happened. We nearly did a guest verse, we had this whole thing that was like ‘Cut them off! Scissors!’”

Curtisy: “I thought I was Teezo Touchdown for a while I swear to god. I wrote this verse, it was just bare drums in a hallway…

‘Cut them off, scissors, cut them off, chopped, cut them off like interruption, cut them off like stop…’

I thought it was so hard, but if I rapped it to anyone they’d say ‘you are fucking buns bro and your vape is dead.’ I was like ‘I’m a normal guy…’”

Owin: “I think I had one day free and I was like ‘I am making this work. I have Alex’s drums down, and then Naoise May’s bits… and it all came together super last minute, and it should never have existed. I’m happy about that. It’s my first time I ever tied to do a Tyler thing and it actually sounded good.”

Fourth Best: “Three records in three years - are you trying to put up Boldy James numbers or what? And what’s in the vault?”

Curtisy: “This is all I do. I’m good at Black Ops 2, and we get the PlayStation out sometimes, but this is all I do. I like rap music, I listen to it, I take it in, and then it’s inside of me and we need to get it out. Whatever starts revealing itself is going to be the next thing, but I want to slow down, I want to go for a walk or something. 

I need to stop for a second and make sure that I’m going to right studio sessions, I’m doing the right things for my career. We made this stuff a long time ago, and now I’m trying to figure out what’s going on next. I’m rushing into things and thinking ‘this isn’t the next album’… I’m thinking ‘I need to get a life’.

Everyone wants me to move to London. Like Owin hasn’t said anything to me personally, he’s trying to come back home, we won’t let him. You stay over there, get your connections. I don’t want to go to fucking London. I want to chill the fuck out, I want to slow down, and London is so fast and buses are so expensive. Any new album? That’s next, but I’m making sure I’m good and it’s not just Owin that’s good. I need to make an another album with my name on it and I’m not just eating off my guy Owin with the hair.”

Fourth Best: “What’s your favourite thing about this album?”

Owin: “What’s your favourite?”

Fourth Best: “Probably the Emily Beattie feature right? Like it feels like this beautiful thing out of nowhere. Reminds me of that one time Lisa Hannigan hopped on a Mango track.”

Owin: “Emily is the goat. She sent me like three different versions of that, but I used the first one. She was sick when she recorded the vocals, and she didn’t realise that made the whole verse sound a lot sadder, more broken up by what she was singing. It’s so vulnerable. I kept it, and she hates me for it. But it’s perfect.”

Curtisy: “Julia Wolf with Yeat was my big inspiration for that. Like ‘oh shit, that’s not supposed to be there, that’s the maddest shit I’ve ever heard’. And it’s not just a fucking gimmick. It’s meant to be there.”

Fourth Best: “I feel like that’s something I like about your music though is that it isn’t necessarily constrained by hip-hop, like your peers aren’t necessarily only hip-hop artists.”

Curtisy: “But I make hip-hop. Like, I want to make more music with instruments and stuff, but I always wanted to be hip-hop. I’m blessed to be a part of it.”

Fourth Best: “Right, like I’m not trying to hit you with the Jack Harlow.”

Curtisy: “I’m Jack Harlow, we need a new hat and we need to get the fuck out of the hip-hop space… No, I love it here.

Like I made a song with Ten Hail Marys. I want to experiment, but I want to bring it back to rap.

Favourite part of the album for me is the fucking end of it. Couch Springs really is. I said it’s like a palette cleanser, a real breath of fresh air at the end of the album. We’ve been through so many things and now we’re back on the shit we started on. Back on the loop, just so fucking sad, and just me rapping through it. I love that. It puts a bow on it.

But I tend to like the last song on every project the most. Unclaimed Land was another one. When Owin said being sad makes you better, being sick makes you sadder, I was sick as fuck for that song. I didn’t like that song at first, and Rory Sweeney kept pushing for it. ‘You sound so, so down, it sounds like everything you say on the album just lands there’.”

Owin: “My favourite track is probably Sonny because it’s getting so much love, but there’s so many moments on the album… Skag’s Molly Malone bar on Bones… I love the sound of Tell Me I’m Good, just feels like the best combination of vocal and instrumental. And it was also the one I had to put the least work into, it just worked. It was easy. There’s a harmony on it that just lands perfect.”

Curtisy: “We had a young cinematographer make a video for it and it’s won a couple of awards actually! The video has a young Curtisy, a small little me, running around the big me. No AI involved, and he’s like smoking and all. It’s actually a crazy video.

But now that the album’s out and now that Sonny’s made and my nephew is a huge part of my life, it all makes perfect sense. My whole life revolves around looking out for younger me. It’s most of my brain right now.”

Fourth Best: “Embracing your unc status.”

Curtisy: “We unc as fuck but we smoke so much weed still. And I actually am just playing Call of Duty. Is that unc?”

Fourth Best: “Black Ops 2 is, surely.”

Curtisy: “Black Ops 7, what the fuck is going on?”

Most of the stuff we make has been pretty low scale. We were in the studio in London and we’d just have a mic set up next to the PlayStation. We aren’t utilising the best of the best because it’s literally not important. You can be anywhere and you can do anything. But one thing that stops me is getting anxious. I’m not music-brained, music-pilled... like having a hard time giving suggestions about the music and where I want it to go. But it’s where I want to go - being around instrumentalists, I want to understand music on a deeper level because I really fucking do this shit. It’s this and Black Ops. I really am watching a lot of Black Ops videos.”

Fourth Best: “Let’s wrap it up, who’s inspiring you in Ireland right now?”

Curtisy: “Fucking everybody. Beddyminaj, AC3, people with energy who don’t give a fuck. Survival and them.

Owin: “Madra Salach. Paul Banks is the best frontman Ireland has had in a long time. Bricknasty are the best band in the world. Karim, Rory, Sloucho is insane… And they’re my bros. I feel very lucky.”