Wish You Were Here...

Consisting of five tracks the EP marks the the first time They Hate Change has used outside production featuring collaborations from Wu-Lu, 96Back, and DJ Orange Julius, as well as Odd Future/NRK’s Vritra, a foundational influence on Change, all of whom they met on their global travels. The EP is an incredibly concise and masterful display of their rap skills and ear for production, building on their sonic omnivore aesthetic bringing together an amalgamation of musical influence. Today you can listen to “Wallabies & Weejuns” produced by Manchester’s 96Back, a track that brings a kaleidoscope of dance, R&B and hip hop production viewed through thrilling tempo changes.

The duo note of the EP:

Our first year of touring consisted of 7 tours, multiple weeklong stints in single cities, a gang of festivals, and about 2 months total (non consecutive) spent at home in Florida. Along with this time period came a bunch of interviews, photo shoots, sessions, new friends, impeccable dinners, decent breakfasts (big up Greggs), as well as literal hundreds of missed calls, texts, DMs and emails, as we traveled across the water and back three times over. No manager to hold down our inbox, no tour manager to book our flights and hotels (if we had a hotel!), no front of house sound tech traveling with us to soundcheck before the show, nobody to set up and sell our merch for us after the show, and nobody to tell us how to get to the next city safely. Just us. These are some of the songs we made with our old and new friends in the middle of all this.”

Dre and Vonne first came together in front of the apartment complex where they both lived as teens. Dre had just moved down from Rochester, NY; Vonne was trying to sell him bad weed. It was clear from the start that the two listened to music differently from most people—they’re sonic omnivores, obsessive deep-divers, lovers of rare and radical sounds. Starting as kids trawling the internet for tracks, they’ve been collecting music from around the world and across the decades, amassing a shared sonic knowledge so deep that “encyclopedic” barely begins to cover it—not just the East Coast hip-hop that Dre grew up on, or the hyperlocal bass-music variants like jook (the Gulf Coast’s twerkably raunchy answer to house) and crank (think “Miami bass meets NOLA bounce”) that Vonne grew up on, but also drum ‘n’ bass, Chicago footwork, post-punk, prog, grime, krautrock, emo, and basically any genre on the map.