Art by Evan Solano
Son Raw might blow up but he won’t go pop.
I first met White Plains NY-via-everywhere rapper Gabe Nandez at his homie’s crib on Montreal’s Saint-Laurent Boulevard in 2015. We immediately connected over hip-hop, living around the world, and how he’d ended up in my hometown. This was the era when MTL was really coming into its own in terms of beat culture and English language hip-hop, and I thought Gabe was the illest cat I’d ever heard locally. DJing around town and trying to push the city’s nascent rap scene, I’d hung out on a lot of couches next to a lot of aspiring rappers, but this was one of the rare cases where I thought we’d got one: a real talent that could break through the noise of the late blog era. Little did I know that he’d smash through that local Montreal ceiling almost immediately, re-centering himself in his true home of NYC to impact underground hip-hop’s ground zero.
In the decade since our first connect, Gabe has built an incredible catalog of rap music, from the trap-meets-beatless fusion of Diplomacy to the rhythmically intense Seven, to a new school flip on the soul beats of last year’s False Profit. Smart and reflective but also hard-hitting and roughneck in equal measure, Gabe’s is a body of work that’s grounded in personal experience without ever losing sight of rap’s hardcore roots. Now, in his biggest look yet, he’s teamed up with underground legend Preservation for Sortilège, a collaborative album for Backwoodz Studioz. It’s the sharpest distillation of Gabe’s vision yet: winding and discursive, and as impactful as a roundhouse kick. Preservation’s beats offer the richest canvas for Gabe’s rhymes to date.
Preservation has been a major contributor to the current underground hip-hop boom in his own right, thanks to his focus on internationally-sourced samples, drums that hit low in the mix and a cinematic emphasis on texture and grit over upfront melodies. Starting out with ’90s experimentalists Sonic Sum, Pres has built a career providing tailor made beats for some of hip-hop’s most iconoclastic artists, from Yaasin Bey (FKA Mos Def) to Mach-Hommy to billy woods to an extended collaboration with Brownsville’s Ka (Rest in Power) as Dr. Yen Lo.
Both Pres and Gabe are well-travelled artists at the vanguard of hip-hop. They’re cats able to take rap into dynamic new spaces without ever losing sight of what makes the genre so special and how its origins provide a road map for the music’s future. The duo aren’t just rapping and making beats for a living: they’re intimately tapped into hip-hop’s subterranean zeitgeist. As such, Sortilège is a record in conversation with the scene’s longstanding innovators: Marci, woods, and Earl. And still, the album remains deeply personal, a travelogue by two men with a duffle bag’s worth of stamped-out, tattered-up passports.
Ahead of the album’s release, we chopped it up about everything from Muay Thai to The Lox, Backwoodz to bangers, Sortilège’s place in the catalog and how to balance go-for-broke bars with more conceptual joints.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)