On his debut album, How Do You Sleep At Night, which was released this past Friday, Sept. Though he has numerous ties to hip hop and has repeatedly experimented with rap himself, the vast majority of Teezo's solo work is alternative and indie rock he is unabashedly a rockstar. Well, the answer is yes, you would be surprised, as long as your only exposure to Teezo was through his first melodic rap single uploaded to Spotify in 2019, titled "Slice," and his features with famous rapper-producers Lil Yachty, Tyler, the Creator and Travis Scott. With leather pants and jacket, thick chains, football eye black, biker gloves and literal construction nails braided into his hair 24/7, would anyone be surprised that he wants to be a rockstar? What he was crafting with this name was more than a silly whim - he was taking on a whole new persona. His stage name makes him sound like a cartoon character, but Teezo didn't stop there. Up-and-coming rapper, producer, songwriter and musician Aaron Thomas, popularly known as Teezo Touchdown, has gone against the grain up until now, he has only released singles and features for his seven years under the pseudonym. If you hope to gain national recognition, you need to be in the studio working on LPs. While singles are a less risky endeavor, and a whole album of music is less likely to retain your audience's attention, the consensus within the music industry is that big artists sell albums. You just have to be patient and not be jaded or bitter and wait for the rest of the world to see.” For Teezo Touchdown, that time has come.It's rare for an artist to wait seven years before releasing their debut album, especially in the age of streaming and the internet. On ‘Familiarity,’ I say, ‘I know that I'm a superstar/But no one gives a fuck.’ So I think everyone who's trying to go for something is always going to see the star in the mirror. “I truly believe in that as part of the magic of the arts: Through that filter, you express things that perhaps you don't even recognize are possible, and thereby draw them closer to you. “I listen to a lot of my music and realize it's like I'm talking to myself in a futurist manner,” Teezo says. But the album’s manic mashups are balanced out by more clear-eyed statements of purpose like “Familiarity,” a breezy indie-pop anthem that doubles as Teezo’s origin-story myth, a reminder to never stop pursuing your dreams and living life to the max, even when you’re making minimum wage. The playful throwback disco of “Mood Swings” more than lives up to its name when it suddenly free-falls into a doomy dirge conversely, the digital thrasher “Too Easy” starts out in a mosh pit before ending up in the boudoir. He delights in upending expectations: “You Thought” hitches its rapid-fire rhymes to machine-gunned drums and pulverizing riffs, but after one minute, this rap-metal assault dissolves into a soft-focus devotional with tranquil guitar melodies and a romantic hook courtesy of Janelle Monáe. However, on How Do You Sleep at Night?, Teezo isn’t simply mashing genres together he’s completely turning conventional notions of rock and rap songwriting inside out. “The sound that I'm crafting is called rock ’n' boom,” Teezo explains to Apple Music. But on his debut full-length release, Teezo sounds less interested in becoming rap’s next big thing than Gen Z’s new rock-star hope. Since his earliest singles, the Texan has delighted in blurring the boundaries between lo-fi trap, DIY R&B, and pawn-shop emo, earning co-signs and feature offers from A-listers like Tyler, The Creator and Travis Scott, while parading his Hellraiser-chic look at New York Fashion Week. Add Teezo Touchdown to that list of genre-benders and experimenters. If there’s one thing that 2023 has proven it’s that a lot of the greatest talents in hip-hop aren’t content to restrict themselves to hip-hop.
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