A pair of Nanaimo rappers with a long personal and professional history are joining forces for their first album.
Last week Konfidential and Teus released their first joint record, The Invasion. Teus said he’s been Konfidential’s recording engineer for nearly 10 years and he’s made appearances on some of his releases, but The Invasion is their first album as a duo.
“A lot of people kept saying to us, ‘You guys sound so good together. You should do an album.’ And then eventually we decided, ‘Hey, we should do an album together,'” Teus said.
The pair started on the project a couple years ago, but since Teus’s “main thing” is working in his Nanaimo studio, he is often forced to prioritize other people’s music. He said COVID-19 isolation gave him and Konfidential the time to focus on themselves.
Teus said The Invasion came together easily because of their long friendship and working history. He said their lyrics and sounds complement each other’s style.
“Our vibes really fit with each other. You don’t have one guy over here talking about pink rainbows and the other guy talking about death and murder,” he said.
Overall, Teus describes The Invasion as a positive album and he hopes that their music helps people get through challenging times.
“I don’t think we have too much darker stuff on it, but we definitely touch on real-life issues that everybody’s going through every day and the frustration of wanting things to be normal” he said of the album. “All throughout history any time there’s been times of stress like this it seems music has always survived because people need music.”
Teus said while the record features traditional hip-hop braggadocio, it’s done in a way that celebrates their accomplishments and signals to the next generation that they too can be successful and may even get to work alongside some of their heroes.
“When I was growing up as a kid in Nanaimo in the ’90s you’d get picked on for being the rapper kid … the next thing you know I’m doing music with Snoop Dogg and WC and guys who are from L.A. that I would have never imagined as a kid. There were posters of these guys on my walls as a child,” Teus said. “I just think that that really shows the reality that anyone can do it.”
Next month the pair plan to hold a live-streamed album release party from Teus’s studio. He said that while a lot of artists are turning to live-streaming, “we found that the quality of the live streams a lot of the people are doing are kind of turning off people from wanting to pay for it.”
Aside from recording, Teus also directs and films music videos and he’s planning to make use of that experience and equipment to give their stream a professional touch.
“We have lights, we have smoke we have the space so we’re like, ‘Why don’t we build an actual stage?'” he said. “We’re going to be doing a three-camera live-stream with an actual camera on a shoulder rig where someone will be able to move around and we’re going to try our best to make it like watching a live performance on Saturday Night Live.”
The Invasion is available here.
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