Nascar Aloe’s HEY ASSHOLE! EP is brash and in-your-face, just as the name suggests—and it’s also exactly what music needs right now. The Los Angeles-based musician has spent the last several years building a devoted fanbase for his audacious and genre-bending musical approach, embracing a gleefully caustic and immediately appealing perspective to the many lanes of overlap when it comes to rap and punk. With HEY ASSHOLE!, Nascar Aloe brings his most impactful and immediate music to date, combining his abrasive hip-hop style with new, rock-situated elements that continue to push his music forward. Defining himself as “a little fucking twerp that came out of my dad’s nutsack,” the North Carolina-born artist formally known as Colby Suoy was invested in music from an early age, as being exposed to his father’s jazz and R&B-leaning taste led to regular viewings of 106 and Park and exploring the expansive sounds of rock, pop, and country. “In North Carolina, the radio bounces all over the place,” he explains, and after acquiring some basic recording equipment he was following suit with his own self-produced music. “I self-taught myself how to record and produce,” Nascar recalls. “I was trying to figure out ways to make serious music.”
Cutting their teeth in the Brooklyn DIY scene since 2014, THICK has solidified itself as a punk powerhouse. Despite playing in fewer basements, the band maintains the vibrant sense of community that sparked its formation, inviting friends-to-be into their world through honest and introspective lyrics. Release after release, THICK fearlessly presents its members’ most intimate thoughts, experiences, and self-explorations in layered melodies and big hooks. Almost a year after releasing their second LP Happy Now (2022, Epitaph Records) and a national headline tour, the band returned to writing with new perspectives and an altered configuration with their drummer Shari Page taking a step back.