Image via Sematary/Instagram
Donald Morrison chooses Key Lime over Pumpkin, and it’s not even close.
There’s a cemetery on the edge of Bushwick called the Cemetery of the Evergreens that expands all the way into Queens. This final resting place for more than 526,000 people is where I meet Sematary in early March. The young Northern California rapper is known for his genre-melding exploration of angst, and a visual aesthetic that’s something like a mix of metal, early Gucci Mane mixtapes, and his former tourmates $uicideboy$.
When I settle in to ask Sematary questions, he looks at me with a tuned-in intensity. A thousand cylinders simultaneously fire off in his head. His music has an immediacy anchored by a love of art and destruction — evidenced by the decommissioned Butcher House where he records and shoots all his videos. Despite the roof caving in last winter, he’s continued to work and live in the home.
Sematary and his manager arrived in an SUV to the Evergreens at the exact moment that an overseer was closing the gates for the day. We decided to instead drive to McCarren Park in Greenpoint to do the interview. It was a strangely nice day in New York, with the sun coming out for the first time in nearly a week. Sematary was playing songs off the newly-released Chief Keef and Mike WiLL Made-It album and chain smoking cigarettes. His manager drove and dutifully rolled the windows up and down depending on if a cigarette was lit or not. We quickly transitioned into playing songs off Sematary’s new mixtape, Bloody Angel, which sees him expanding his sound with the shoegaze-inspired single, “Wendigo.”
Sematary’s aesthetic has earned the Haunted Mound crew a cult-like status. His music is an amalgam of his inspirations: Chief Keef, Gucci Mane, the metal band Salem. The rabid fans that make up the core of the Haunted Mound subreddit spend their days pontificating on everything from Sematary’s drug consumption to what his diet is. This particular subset of fans is not something Sematary likes to talk about. He would prefer to not be roped into conversations about his peers; he views himself and his Haunted Mound crew to be peerless. He may be right. The average Haunted Mound fan doesn’t fit any particular mold: there’s teenagers who would have been Soundcloud rap fans 8 years ago. Teenagers who would have been hard rock fans 20 years ago love Sematary, too. He’s managed to make something new out of the shattered pieces of scenes past.
When we got to McCarren Park, we found a bench and talked for close to two hours. We touched on everything from movies, traveling, the underground, and the future of the Haunted Mound crew. Sematary looked forward to the release of Bloody Angel, which has since been well-received from fans, with his experimentation even garnering attention from listeners outside of his usual orbit. He’s just now finishing the final leg of the accompanying tour and looking forward to a small break, although he says that’s probably unlikely. “It’s going to end up being like a month, then I’m going to have to mix a Buckshot song or something,” Sematary said. “I could never be gone for long.”