18-year-old Irish rapper Earfzilla has quickly become an internet-darling. The teen, who has made star patches a signature, wears his Evisus backward (s/o Lil Tekla) and sings “I just hope that fate knows where I’m going because I don’t know,” on his September single “Vintage Vuitton,” is well on his way to over 2.4 million listens on Spotify. From the outside looking in it seems pretty obvious what direction Earfzilla is heading in. And if this trajectory—which will be boosted by the release of his debut album, “The After Glow,” on Friday, the 13th,—continues, it will soon be Earfzilla’s world that we’re living in.
If the cover art is anything to go by, it’s a place you’ll want to linger. The trippy collage is a visualization of Earfzilla’s personal Eden where the real and imagined intermingle. The streets, buildings, and tuck shops are those Earfzilla frequents. Among the herd of sheep, CDs, cherubs, and logo accessories, is an anthropomorphized cuppa. “I’ve been seriously drinking tea like a sport since I was a child, just because of how close I was with my nana,” says the artist whose catchy single, “hennyinmytea,” has over 500,000 plays. The ebullience of this song is typical of Earfzilla’s upbeat sound; what makes this track foundational is the artist’s assertion in it that he is “a real Irish boy.”
“My style is what I’ve been around, which is what everyone’s wearing—track suits, puffer jackets.… I’ve always tried to step out of my comfort zone and wear things I thought were cool. I don’t really care about brand names specifically; I care about things that look weird and look unique. Nothing’s really a statement, but it’s all just a little bit outside the box.”
Earfzilla (né Tyler Williams) lives in a Dublin suburb called Churchtown, which he describes as “a simple kind of place” with “every aspect of person.” The artist’s attachment to home and to country is acute because of his early separation from it. Jobs were scarce after the Irish banking crisis of the early ’00s. Earfzilla’s parents moved to a small English village on the border of Wales for work; this is where he was born and grew up feeling like an outsider. “Because everyone’s always saying, ‘Oh, you’re the Irish kid,’ you notice it from a very young age,” he said. “I’ve always been so conscious of what home is, and it is Dublin.”
Ireland isn’t the first country you associate with rap, but then, neither was Sweden when Yung Lean (Jonatan Leondoer Håstad) emerged from the cold north. The continued influence of Sad Boys and Drain Gang on the next gen cannot be overstated, and many commentators draw parallels between Earfzilla and the Swede (who started out singing about Arizona Iced Tea). What strikes me, besides their geographical distance from the origins of rap (and the advantages of a supportive small “town” community where fame is downplayed rather than flamed), is an affirmative, can-do attitude. Making something from nothing with your friends is positive (you are adding something to the world) and punk (you learn as you go). In both cases, a collaborative foundation has fostered an approach that is purpose- rather than ego-led. And Earfzilla, for all his cheery easygoingness, has an immutable core strength that keeps him grounded as well, he jokes, as a family that won’t let him become too big for his britches.
“I wanted to drop it in autumn time when the leaves turn brown, because I feel like everyone’s so focused on making Song of the Summer and I don’t even like summer. I’m way too Irish to deal with the heat; I’ll be getting so sunburned. After glow [is] such a perfect explanation of what I’m trying to make, which is a kind of hazy euphoria that isn’t necessarily happy or sad…. I’m not trying to capture the actual moments …. I’m trying to sit in the reflection.”
“Can’t take the Dublin out of the boy,” the artist has ‘grammed, but you can take Dublin—or a slice of it—around the globe. World-building comes easily to Earfzilla, who, at a young age, would draw or make collages with cut-outs from his mother’s Vogues rather than play with toys. His fascination with knights and castles grew to include cartoons, and then comics. The three Rs were another story: “The only thing I liked about school and the only reason I would go into school was for art,” he said. “That kept me going because I really just didn’t like school at all. I used to stare at the window every class and pretend a limo was going to pull up and I’d jump out the window.”
To impress his secondary (US middle) school teacher, who led a double life as a graffiti artist, Earfzilla got even more serious about his illustrations. “I thought I’d set up an Instagram account to post these drawings…it was called the Random Earthling…and that’s how I started Earfzilla, the artist recalls. Earfzilla is a TH-fronting of earthling. “Identity is such a big thing in people’s artistic journeys and how they present themselves. To take all identity out of something and still have an identity, I think is what an Earthling is,” the artist tells Teen Vogue on a call. “I do really believe in being a background character and being a wallflower,” he continues. “Being just another earthling kind of makes everything a lot more fun; it’s just less to think about. I feel like if everyone’s a background character, they are also a main character. It’s kind of a paradox, but I want people to feel small. And it doesn’t mean I want to make people feel inferior to something, but I think if we’re all small and if we all zoom out, I think we kind of start to realize nothing’s that deep.”
Between the ages of 14 and 16, Earfzilla used his creativity to gain entry into Dublin’s underground. ” I was like, ‘If I can make art, I can be in this scene in my own way.’ The formula I had was that I would draw an underground rapper I was interested in, and then they would repost it to their story if they saw it. And then all of their fans would come and try to buy cover art off me. I used to just come home from school and work on all these commissions I had while talking to my nana.” Among the artists he painted is Travy, a chart-topping rapper Earf likens to an Irish Central C. Earzilla was also styling and trying to break into modeling. “I feel like if you want to succeed, you need to be okay with being in the backseat and you need to be okay with not being in the limelight. And then there’s always a time when the light shines on you, but you have to be okay with that not being all the time,” Earfzilla says.
“A big thing that I always want people to know is that Earfzilla is a passion project that went well, and it is me and my friends. I’m trying to figure it all out right now. People might see this one win, but I was doing all of this stuff with the same intention and with the same mentality for six years before this, and I didn’t really go anywhere. It was just for fun. I always wanted to make it really clear that me and my friends are just figuring this out and I wouldn’t be able to do this without them.”
Yet as he continued to build out his world he couldn’t help but notice it was largely uninhabited. At the start of his fifth year [junior] year, things came to a head. “I was seeing all these rappers my age and I looked around,” says the artist who was looking for the missing puzzle piece. Usually, people “have the music and they need to make everything else,” Earfzilla explains, “but for me, it was like I have everything else and I just need to figure out how to make music, which is probably the hardest part. … I think the music was kind of like the landing strip for them to land on my world; it’s what made it welcoming.”
The sound is similarly hospitable and the lyrics are refreshingly personal. “I don’t know what thе day holds/Probably the same old/Same bus trip to thе park in the same clothes,” he sings in “Round Here.” Earfzilla describes his world as “weird, but also very normal…by normal I mean relatable. I feel like if the subject matter you talk about and the things that you pay attention to, like Young Lean with the Arizona Ice Tea, if it’s all so normal, it makes it feel so much more special,” Earfzilla says. “I think thinking small-scale just does wonders for everyone’s mental health and what they prioritize in life.”
My parents are supportive obviously. There’s no instructions manual on what happens if your kid becomes an underground rapper. But I suppose my parents were just kind of confused, but they weren’t that surprised. My dad said it himself, it’s just kind of how I am, is that I’m always doing crazy stuff and not talking about it, which is how I would like things to stay. It means a lot to my nana because she’s seen me try and try and try so many times.”
“People really, really notice the star patches. I wasn’t thinking too much on it. I think they have a lot of graphic impact. Well, I just had the star patches on because I have spots because I’m a teenager. I suppose it’s cooler to have stars on your face than spots, I suppose.”
“I got those New York X Jordan 5s and in the box, there were blue laces, white laces, and black laces. I just thought it’d be way cooler if I just [used different colors] I’m just a maximalist, I suppose. It’s like why would I have one color laces when I can have two? I mean, I can’t have three because I have only two shoes to work with, but I just thought the more color and the more stuff, the better.”
It’s the blurring of lines between what’s real and what’s fictional that most interests Earfzilla when it comes to music and to fashion. It starts with the sound; Earf’s voice is pitched and sped up. And the man behind “Vintage Vuitton,” who also has a song called “Bootleg” featuring Gone Like Summer, bought a designer bag for his 18th birthday that he was told was real but thinks is fake, and he’s not bothered about it. “I feel like there’s more character and fake stuff because it’s not perfect. It’s all flawed, and I find that a lot more special, [it’s] just funny because it’s so unapologetically fake that it just makes it real.”
That in-betweenness is something that Earfzilla is experiencing in his own life—as an 18-year-old existing between childhood and adulthood—and that he wants to capture in his music. “‘Hypnopompia’ is a big word that I was really obsessed with at the start of the year,” he continues. “It’s like the stage your brain is in when you’ve kind of half woken up, you’re still dreaming… I feel like it describes what I’m trying to do where it’s all very real, but I’m still kind of dreaming, which is what I kind of feel like my life is nowadays.” Just imagine last year Earfzilla was attending a Feng concert; this year he was the opening act for Feng. Also, when he posted “hennyinmytea” on DistroKid, Earfzilla only knew it would drop within about 10 days. It ended up being released very quickly when he was in class.
The name of the album builds on this idea of transition. “I’m not trying to capture the actual moments, and I’m not trying to capture the actual events. I’m trying to sit in the afterglow. I’m trying to sit in the reflection,” he says. Perfection doesn’t exist in the porous in-between, and Earfzilla is fine with that, just as he’s fine with dupes. “The whole thing of doing something wrong is how you pave a new way.”
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
Want more great Culture stories from Teen Vogue? Check these out:
Source link
