A7PHA

about

The best art comes from the fringes. Easy signifiers and borrowed nostalgia will always sell, but the work that truly speaks to us, the songs that reframe the ways we look at the world, always arise from those with one foot removed from our realities. That’s where A7PHA comes in. Two celebrated veterans—anticon. co-founder Doseone and the esteemed underground rapper Mestizo—come together, the only ones strange enough to understand one another. A7PHA is the culmination of years of radical thought, lives lived on the knife’s edge. Their self-titled debut record (anchored by production from Alias) absorbs that left-field energy, splinters it into component parts, and re-assembles it into something uniquely human. Listen to “AT THE ALTAR”: a song built on steely, industrial instrumental pieces, but in its final form, you can practically hear the track inhale and exhale. The breaths are strung together by Doseone and Mestizo’s vocals, which flit back and forth from staccato and precise, to formless and gothic. Or check “99 POINT STATIC,” where the track builds such steam that when the bottom falls out on the coda, you get transported through to the end on raw adrenaline. A7PHA does this over and over—building massive tidal waves of raw, immovable emotions, then turning on a dime, and leaves you scrambling to keep up. Few boast the pedigree to forge something so simultaneously listenable and invitingly bizarre. Doseone has spent two decades as one of hip-hop’s most inscrutable t