A few weeks back, 21-year-old musician ericdoa figured out how to connect his production setup to his computer so he could stream his creative process to Twitch. He decided to test his method with a live broadcast of over two hours where he would rap and sing whatever came into his head. “I don't even know what I'm saying,” he croons over a minimalistic, boring piano melody. Ericdoa's vocals infuse emotional intensity into his often nonsensical rapping. At one point in the stream he joked about “Jelqmaxxing,” which is a reference to a possibly arcane exercise that some men do to stretch the length of their penises. “Tretching to the max,” he sang.
Then, about 25 minutes later, something transcendent happened. By then the topic had gone from silly to deeply personal. ericdoa found himself mining his subconscious, awakening memories of his grandfather who died of Covid. You could see him pause to compose himself before uttering a line that has since been etched into the internet hivemind as 'rizz' or 'skibidi toilet', somewhat shocking in its ridiculousness. “Imagine if Ninja had a low taper fade,” Ericdoa sang, repeating the line and stretching the words into oblivion.
“There was a moment where I said, 'OK, maybe I'm a little too vulnerable online,'” explains ericdoa via Zoom. “And I literally said the first thing that came to mind. I think Ninja doing a low taper fade haircut was the first thing that came to mind and was silly enough to keep me from crying in front of a bunch of people.'
Clips of this series quickly took off across TikTok, with thousands of videos reusing the audio. Ninja, the wildly popular Twitch streamer whose name popped into ericdoa's mind at the time, also caught on. He went so far as to rock said haircut (or at least a close approximation), debuting it in a TikTok set to audio from ericdoa's stream and shared via the official NFL account. This video alone has over 17 million views. “It's like a full-circle moment, which is so hilarious,” says ericdoa. “All my activities as a youth had nothing to do with music. It was just video games.”
Being called out by one of the most popular online creators in the world is probably as good a promo as any artist can get before a new album. Ericdoa's new LP, DOA, arrives this week and says he's already seen a noticeable uptick in streams for his back catalog since the clip went viral. “It was so wild, the catalog is definitely streaming,” he says. “I've had a lot of people tell me they watched the whole stream and heard the music and they're like, 'Wow, like I wasn't expecting that.'
These new fans will definitely not be disappointed DOA presents some of the young musician's most accomplished work. Ericdoa started with the hyperpop subculture that emerged on SoundCloud in the 2010s and retains much of the high-octane style of that era, but with a new level of sophistication.
In the 14 months he spent working on this project with collaborators such as producer Zetra, he began to study the history of his Puerto Rican heritage, particularly the activist movements of the 1970s and the spirit of community and mutual aid. “I was listening to a lot of music while doing this project and I really fell in love with my own culture,” he says. “I'm Puerto Rican, so I would listen to a lot of old music that my parents would listen to and my grandparents would listen to. I was obsessed with the New Lords movement in the 70s and drew a whole visual aesthetic from that for the project.”
He mentions taking further guidance from songs like salsa legend Willie Colón's “Oh, Qué Será?”: “There was a point where he says in Spanish that the only gesture is to believe or not. This really inspired me and everyone else doing this project. If we think it's going to be something beautiful, it's going to do what it's going to do, as long as you believe.”
As for the “hyperpop” descriptor, ericdoa says he's grateful for that period of his life, but wouldn't want it to be what defines him as an artist. “I wanna be Eric, man,” he says. “That's the only thing I want to do. I want to be a person that people don't just like for their personality, but for their art and music and everything that revolves around them.” On songs like “kickstand,” ericdoa makes a compelling case for himself as a straight rapper, delivering a cool and melodic flow. Elsewhere, like on “lastjune,” the vibe is somewhere between country, hyperpop, and Yeat, which is increasingly looking like the standard for artists of ericdoa's generation.
Speaking of generations, Ericdoa has thoughts about his own. “We're kind of omnipotent in a sense because we have access to all the knowledge in the world in our pockets, so we don't have to be bad at anything. We're in a weird time for music because we grew up in a sense where we didn't need engineers. We didn't need a studio to get through. All you needed was either your phone, or if you had a condenser microphone, you could figure out how to mix yourself at age 13.”
This may explain why there is such an emphasis on honesty in ericdoa's music. In a world where everything is everywhere, he has chosen to be true to himself. “All these songs on here are supposed to be the heaviest version of me,” he says. “I went into so many of these songs with no idea – a lot of them are all over the place. And I feel like it's compressed in a way where the 'everywhere' sounds harmonious.”
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