DEZ

Barrie, Ontario · b. 2001 · FARA Records

DEZ (Desmond Roy, b. 23 December 2001, Barrie, Ontario) grew up in the same city as NEVE, with the same relationship with a scene an hour down the highway. The GTA is close enough that Toronto slang and Toronto music arrive in Barrie in real time and far enough that nobody from Barrie is in any of it, which produces a very particular kind of fluency — he sounds completely at home in a form he's mostly experienced from outside it. That's not a criticism; it's the whole subject of the record, and he's honest about it in the verse rather than pretending otherwise. He found his way in writing over instrumentals off the internet from about fourteen, in the ordinary way. He and NEVE have been making things in each other's bedrooms since they were seventeen, and this is the first one they've put out.

Conversational, unhurried and dry, in a Toronto and Greater Toronto Area accent — genuinely one of the more distinctive accents in English-language music, blending Caribbean patois inflection, London slang and North American vowels in a way that's instantly recognisable and very hard to fake. He doesn't shout and doesn't stack punchlines; the verse works because it's a person thinking out loud and admitting something slightly embarrassing. He's a better writer than performer and knows it — his verse on this record works because it's observational and slightly self-mocking rather than because of any technical display. His influences run the Toronto conversational rap lineage and the specific local habit of borrowing London slang, which arrived in Barrie the same way everything else did — through a screen, in real time.

Warm and quick and entirely without posture, which is unusual in a rapper and is his main asset. He's the one who does the talking between songs and is funnier than the record suggests. His verse is the only place in the song where anybody says outright that they weren't there — he wrote that on purpose and refused to soften it. Toronto slang reaches Barrie in real time and Barrie reaches Toronto approximately never, which he finds funnier than he probably should. He's a better writer than performer and says so before anyone else can. Observant, self-mocking, easy.