From Rap Beginnings to a Bass-Heavy Future, Herobust Breaks All the Rules on ‘I’m Aloud’

The first time Herobust went to a “rave,” he was not feeling it.

“My progression or evolution as an entity in dance music, it wasn’t typical,” Herobust, née Hayden Kramer, remembers. “It wasn’t like I was going to shows where I loved the music, and I saw what the DJ was doing and said, ‘I want to be that guy,’ and I just worked until I got there.”

Though he now lives in Brooklyn, the producer traces his production roots to his repped hometown of Atlanta. He started off making heady hip-hop beats, more J Dilla and Flying Lotus than 12th Planet or RL Grime.

“I climbed the ranks [of that scene],” he says. “I played with all my idols and played all the world-renowned events I had grown up really idolizing. But in Atlanta, at the shows I was getting, I was the oddball opener that sounded like elevator music before a dubstep set, or something like that.”

Those moments of exposure, strange for the young music maker as they were, changed his sound forever.

“I had been hearing [dubstep] in the wrong context,” he says. “The context of my music was sitting on a couch at home, probably watching Adult Swim, smoking weed, right? I would be doing that, and I would hear some crazy dubstep shit, and I was like, ‘This is obnoxious. Please turn this off; it’s ridiculous.’ But when I saw it in the right context, that’s when it really clicked.”

Soon enough, without any force of hand or purposeful intention, harder drops, harsher synths, and wilder tempos infiltrated his rap-beat roots. While parts of his original fanbase scratched their heads, new faces began appearing at his shows. He slowly began to fit in more with the regular programming, and before he knew it, he earned a reputation as one of the hottest up-and-coming voices in the trap-dance movement.

“I’m uncontrollably inspired and influenced by the shit around me,” he says. “Like right now, all my music is sounding a little bit more dubstep-y than usual, because I just went on tour with 12th Planet, Datsik and Protohype. I love all kinds of music. I know everybody says that, but it really is true for me. What you’re hearing come out of me is just really an amalgamation of all the music I’m around, and because I legitimately like it, I’m going to throw it in. I couldn’t even stop it.”

His chameleonic style gives him a unique edge, but to hear him tell it, it’s as much a curse as it is a gift.

“If I’m around different shit I know is going to influence my music in a way that I don’t want it to, I have to try to get away from it,” he says. “I try to stay off of SoundCloud now, because I understand a lot of people are learning how to produce, and you’ve got to learn somewhere, but as a whole, there’s a lot of fluff in the scene. There’s a lot of delusion happening, a lot of just unoriginal music being made.”

Having spent most of his time in 2015 on the road rather than the studio, Kramer found himself caught in a loop. He was constantly searching for new tracks in a worldwide web of vapid waste. It started to get under his skin. He’d work on a song for hours, only to realize halfway through that he hated everything about it. He became depressed and “unenthused” and was damn near ready to give up.

Instead of abandoning his passion, he quit the outside world, deciding rather to ignore the trends of the scene and make room in his head for his own voice. He experimented, he blended, he toiled, and he won. He landed his first official release on Mad Decent, a label he’s been chasing after for years, and come January 22, he’ll celebrate his weirdest, most left-field release of his career, the aptly titled I’m Aloud EP.

“I’m allowed to make whatever I want, so it works in that way,” he says, “but it also works like ‘aloud,’ or audible. I’m actually making noise, whereas maybe other producers aren’t because they’re just reproducing some other shit.”

Besides being “really strange,” Kramer describes I’m Aloud as “a cool fusion of trap and dubstep.” At times, it’s very riddim-influenced, but all the while in a style and attitude that’s still very hip-hop.

“I’m really proud of it,” he says. “I’m really stoked on how cohesive it is, how clear the identity of it is.”

In the coming year, Kramer hopes to stay home a bit more than he did in 2015. He wants to keep the studio energy flowing, taking more time to produce than live out of a suitcase. He hopes to dig in hard to his old rap beginnings, finding the simple joy in creating an eight-bar loop and calling it a hit, and to get more involved in the merger of dance and hip-hop as a whole. I’m Aloud has once again assured him that anything is possible, and he hopes that’s a lesson others accept as well.

“I would really enjoy seeing the next generation of producers be inspired by this music—not to make music like my music, but to make music however they want music to be,” he says. “If you hear this and it inspires you to just make something new and totally different and totally you, then that’s a beautiful thing, and that’s what I hope this EP does for people.”

I’m Aloud from Herobust is available now on Mad Decent.

Kat Bein is a citizen of the world who lives on the internet. Follow her on Twitter.

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