Let’s clear this up now: Tomowen calling their new album MARVELOUS isn’t a brag. For the Boston-based duo — comprised of rapper Tomo and producer Owen — “marvelous” is a term that comes with equal chances of menace and amazement.
“You don’t know whether to be scared and run, or fall in love and praise it,” Tomo tells Vanyaland, reflecting on the meaning behind the title. Just like the title “Tomowen” fuses the pair’s musical fortes, MARVELOUS interweaves life’s polar truths: Specifically, the “duality of life being a young Black artist in Boston.”
“Being a Black artist in Boston right now is amazing because we are in a renaissance of art, but there are many struggles that people are unaware of that just aren’t spoken about enough,” Tomo explains.
Despite the city’s efforts to expand its creative resources, surviving off art alone still feels impossible to many area musicians, he says. Even scene vets start to sweat in the face of rising rent costs, a pervasive attitude that creativity is merely profitable content, and toxic positivity radiating from social media. And that’s not even factoring in the hazards outside of the creative sphere.
“The duality I was speaking about specifically is being able to do a show in front of 100-plus people and still worry about how you’re going to make rent next month,” Tomo elaborates. “Being a full-time artist in Boston also means seeing peers you grew up with fall victim to the streets, die, graduate, start families within years’ time, all while you’re working on pursuing a career in art that takes up so much of your time. I spent so much time working on my craft I didn’t even get to go to my friend’s baby shower before she was tragically killed in 2021.”
Yet there’s a certain strength that comes with acknowledging life’s harsh realities, rather than burying them under nonchalant Instagram captions, or trying to forget them altogether. As MARVELOUS seesaws atop Owen’s ominous beats, the record radiates a sense of wisdom, earned by looking hardship in the eye.
“Throughout this process of making the album, Tomo had already known that he wanted it to be called ‘marvelous,'” Owen shares, “so to me, MARVELOUS is a state of mind — a state of feeling powerful.”
Tap in below.