Bobby Blaque Releases Fire New Original Track ‘STICKS’!

Bobby Blaque was adopted from his homeland of Colombia at the age of three and raised in Luleå, Sweden. Experiencing the identity crisis that a lot of trans-racially adopted children do, Bobby left Luleå for Stockholm and then Gothenburg not too long after. It was here that he eventually started to dabble with music as a form of expression. After a couple of hundred attempts at cloning the autotune crooning of artists like Travis Scott, he found his place in the lighter side of the trap scene — instead taking inspiration from the happy raps underground scene and artists such as pinkcaravan! and Sam Stan. Combining forces with artist/producer omgitsbxrt (of hollowgang), Bobby Blaque created his own lane in urban pop-rap, with a lush organic soundscape that takes the rich and eloquent compositions from the likes of Ryan Lewis and Ramin Djawadi, puts them together with the hard groovy rhythm’s of modern Hip-Hop and finally sprinkles the whole cake with the simple, catchy melodies of pop music.

The result is best defined as the bastard child of the alternative Hip Hop scene during its long-running affair with bubblegum Pop music, commonly referred to as Bubblegum Rap or Bubblegum Trap. Energetic productions filled to the brim with life combined with catchy melodies and simplistic, yet refined lyricism. While the identity crisis lies at the core of his penmanship, Bobby Blaque chooses to focus a lot more on the positive than the negative — keeping the themes and topics of his songwriting light with deeper roots.

The experiment of combining the two turned out to be a massive success, with ‘Thirty Rack$’ quickly becoming the fastest-growing song in Rexius Records history, reaching the 1,000,000 mark in a record-breaking 73 days. With an album in the works, and way over 200,000 anxious fans — Bobby Blaque seems to be an unstoppable force.

Gothenburg rapper Bobby Blaque’s second single ‘STICKS’ introduces us to a sound with certain noir undertones, without fully abandoning the whimsical flow approach that defined his breakthrough debut ‘Thirty Rack$’. Somewhere in between the identity crisis derived from his background as a trans-racially adopted child and the quirky bubblegum-influenced aesthetics of his producer Trap Teddy, Blaque rhymes effortlessly over an alternative beat with influences ranging from BROCKHAMPTON to Tyga. 

Following the overwhelming streaming success of ‘Thirty Rack$’, Blaque now experiments with a raw sound devoid of the autotuned singsong that characterized his debut. The rapper’s flow in ‘STICKS’ flirts with crude imagery, which creates the atmosphere of a noir comic book when combined with Trap Teddy’s strange beat: Equal parts coarse Gothenburg underground and peculiar humor. 

There is more than one noir parallel to draw where Bobby Blaque is concerned. Beyond laid-back appearances, the alleyways of his unconscious mind still revisit the traumatic experience of trans-racial adoption in early childhood. Providing his flows with lyric realism would’ve been simplistic, however. Instead, his work with Trap Teddy has led to the ambiguous aesthetics crystallized on ‘STICKS’.  The sound of ‘STICKS’ is an appetizer for an EP that will be released in February. According to Trap Teddy, the aesthetics of the song are derived from another track of the compilation, which ended up becoming a different song after countless transformations in the studio.

Stream this single below and grab your copy here.

photo by: Matilda Hammar