New Track City to perform at Underground Coffee House
By Josh Hughes
This coming Wednesday, Federal Way rap duo New Track City will be performing an in-house set at the Associated Students own KUGS. Later in the evening they will also do a set at the Underground Coffee House as part of their weekly concert series.
Bem and Chi. Stone, the two MC’s of the group, make up quite the charismatic duo. Most New Track City songs feature one of the two handling chorus duty, followed by two utilitarian verses of intricate wordplay, similes and layered meaning. Producer Dru on Beats rounds out the trio, providing the rappers with jagged jazz grooves and clever trap influences.
To borrow a phrase from Groggs from Injury Reserve, “this ain’t jazz rap, this that this that spazz rap / this that raised by the internet ain’t had no dad rap”. New Track City adhere loosely to this blue-collar rap manifesto, existing somewhat outside the normal sphere of contemporary hip-hop yet never sounding outdated or out of place.
“They’re from Federal Way, which is by Lynwood, where I live,” said KUGS Specialty Music Director Rebekah Way. “I was excited upon first hearing them because there’s never anything that comes out of there— it’s mainly just suburbs.”
In their late twenties, the members of New Track City rep their hometown proudly. As most groups from the surrounding areas claim Seattle as their hometown, there’s something exciting about a fresh hip-hop sound coming out of an area with little to no rap culture.
To get a feel for their music, their production flutters between Chance The Rapper indebted gospel sounds and minimal 808s & Heartbreaks percussion by way of Noah “40” Shebib or Mike Dean. The opening of their latest record, “Lose Sight of Shore”, features a jazzy piano loop that perfectly combines these two styles. Later in the record, songs like “Close” even feel inspired by the dead-mall blues of vaporwave.
Lyrically, however, they’re much more comfortably situated outside the sphere of mainstream rap references. Opening track “Right Now” shouts out both Gil Scott-Heron and Tupac within two bars, and many of their one-liners involve references to philosophy and their college years. The name of the album itself comes from a term coined by French philosopher Andre Gide.
“Is it right, is it wrong? / I spent my whole life saying we about to be on, but now we’re here though,” reads a line from their song “Ghetto”. It’s a good statement about what the group is all about. While they’ve yet to break out of their semi-local sphere, New Track City are gracefully edging their way into the scene where they feel like they belong.
At the end of “Time”, the last track on their EP, the two MCs have a seemingly candid conversation about where they’ve been and where they’ve gotten to in their careers as rappers.
“We’re in our twenties, about to be in our thirties— we don’t wanna be those people who have regrets. And if we do have regrets we want them to be regrets we can live with,” says one of the MCs, providing the ever under-appreciated rap album thesis statement.
New Track City will be performing on air, live, at KUGS this Wednesday at 3 p.m. Their set at the coffeehouse will occur later in the evening at 7 p.m.