As of today — August 4, 2020 — it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this trash heap of a year has brought most of us to our knees. To that, Cliff Notez, Dephrase, and Latrell James offer up a bop in defiance.
Blessing us with a one-off Boston supergroup, the three artists have unleashed an immaculate new song in today’s “Voodoo Doll.” The track is the first release from Social Absence, a collaborative EP from Dephrase and Notez, due out August 14.
The two artists initially met upon discovering they were next-door neighbors at their production space. “We immediately clicked,” Notez tells Vanyaland. “Him and Flowerthief [the other half of Optic Bloom] were my new brothers almost immediately.”
Dephrase, in turn, had already began working on “Voodoo Doll” with Latrell James, although he says it didn’t really feel finished until Cliff Notez came into the fold.
“This specific track was a song me and Dephrase put together a few years back,” James explains. “[I] Loved the song but both felt it was incomplete. I couldn’t tap back into the space I was in mentally to finish the record. I’m happy that Cliff and Dephrase took it to the next level. It was just a skeleton until they got their hands on it.”
“Because I often produce a majority of my own stuff, when I connect with other producers, it’s usually for a strong bond,” Notez adds. “Dephrase was and still keeps creating these beautiful sonic-scapes, which allow me to explore my flow, delivery, harmonies in so many ways I don’t often get the chance to fully explore. That’s what he gave me with ‘Voodoo Doll.’ I remember us talking for like an hour about footwork and drum production. Latrell and Dephrase laid the groundwork for something truly unique and inspiring. Especially with my Haitian background, a song like this allowed me to dig into a range of different topics in a ton of different ways, which is always dope. Then Dephrase is like me, where in which we kept reworking it for two years, worked it into an EP, and now we are less anxious about the world hearing it, lol.”
Painstakingly acknowledging that life’s currently on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, Notez, Dephrase, and James have given listeners a song to put on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat to ease some of this year’s numbness.
Hey, if 2020 is an absolute gut-punch, you might as well make a bop about it. Despite its dizzying subject matter, that’s exactly what “Voodoo Doll” is — a bop that builds into a staggering spiral and collapses into placid saxophone notes.
And that’s the sound of swiftly bringing someone to their goddamn knees.
Tune in below. And wear some knee pads.