[SONG OF THE DAY] Terrell Hines - "Wu Dirt"

Happy to report that Terrell Hines is keeping busy in quarantine. Which is wonderful, because 2019 was really him putting his best foot forward. He released his debut EP, St. Marks Rd., which saw the track “Get Up” get featured in the 2019 Apple keynote. He also had a lovely on Beck’s Hyperspace, which we know I’m a little biased on, but really I thought it was a nice pairing for what Beck was going for.

Now he’s been gearing up for the release of his forthcoming mixtape, Portal One: The Mixtape, which is out on August 7th courtesy of Capitol. He’s been cranking tracks leading up to the official release, including a Y2K Remix of “Get Up” (in addition to a version of the original featuring a verse from Vince Staples), “St. Marks Rd.”, “Promise”, and most recently, “Wu Dirt”, which also has the accompanying video below. Hines is a hologram after my own heart, with the concepts driving his music being in the postmodern + post-apocalyptic. A sampling of some of my favorite lyrics from, “Wu Dirt”, to show you what I mean:

Some type of way we got caught in a hyperlooper
I portal drifted all the way to the future
I feel like we in a high-speed computer
Unlock myself inside my crazy dreams
Now I’m roaming all through these metallic streams
Propaganda yea that’s the new dopamine
Damn I think I like postmodernity

When he’s not shooting his own music videos courtesy of a green screen, you can find him devouring books on linguistics, synesthesia, or evolutionary psychology in his downtime.

I’m probably gonna have to chase down an interview with him fairly soon. I feel like we could spend at least 15 minutes talking about algorithms.