We Speak Music

Tracy Grimm x bgboi ‘4 Years Later’ Is a Soundtrack to Survival

Published

3 hours ago

June 23, 2025

Tracy Grimm and bgboi have crafted something truly special with 4 Years Later—an album that plays out like a film, with each track capturing a different frame of emotional intensity. From start to finish, the project pulses with sincerity, blending ambient trap production and emotionally charged verses into something that’s at once intimate and cinematic.

The production is one of the album’s strongest assets. bgboi brings a modern, forward-thinking sensibility that takes influence from plugg, trap, and emo rap but never feels locked into a formula. There’s a dreamlike, almost surreal quality to the beats, which complement Tracy’s raw, reflective delivery perfectly. Their sonic chemistry feels natural, like two artists working toward the same emotional vision.

What truly sets 4 Years Later apart is its emotional honesty. Tracy doesn’t shy away from hard topics—loss, isolation, inner turmoil—but he delivers them with clarity and conviction. His lyrics cut through the production like confessions, giving the album a deep emotional resonance. bgboi matches that energy with melodies that feel like they come from a place of lived experience.

This isn’t music made for the charts; it’s made for people who need something real to hold onto. There’s an underlying vulnerability that refuses to be dressed up or diluted. You can hear the years of struggle, reflection, and perseverance that led to this moment. Every track contributes to the overall arc of the project, and nothing feels like filler.

Tracy Grimm has always walked the line between darkness and beauty in his music, and here he does so more confidently than ever. His artistic identity—uncompromising and unfiltered—shines. Meanwhile, bgboi emerges as a true innovator, not only in sound but in spirit. His instincts elevate the record, adding dynamic contrast to the darker themes.

4 Years Later isn’t just an album—it’s a journey. And by the time it’s over, listeners will feel like they’ve walked every step with Tracy and bgboi. It’s a testament to the power of honest music, and it deserves to be heard far beyond Ireland’s borders.

Tracy Grimm: INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | SOUNDCLOUD | SPOTIFY

bgboi: INSTAGRAM | SOUNDCLOUD | SPOTIFY

We Speak Music

Mutual Shock’s Nervous Systems Showcases The Architecture of Alienation

Published

2 hours ago

June 23, 2025

Philomena Marie

Seattle’s ever-shifting musical landscape has long given rise to voices that thrive in the gray areas—between genres, between moods, between identities. Dan Powers, the artist behind Mutual Shock, adds a new entry into that canon with Nervous Systems, a debut album that operates as both sonic exorcism and sociocultural diagnosis. At its core, the record is a meditation on life under late capitalism—a terrain where dread, detachment, and digital blur are not just thematic textures, but everyday conditions.

Emerging from the shadowy emotional terrain explored on his 2024 EP Stimulus Progression, Powers takes his vision further here—not louder, but deeper. Nervous Systems doesn’t seek to overwhelm. Instead, it seeps in. It’s less an album you “hear” and more one you slowly inhabit, like a strange new architecture that reveals its structure room by room. The choice of analog synths and skeletal drum programming isn’t retro affectation; it’s a design choice rooted in feeling, in tension, in deliberate control.

Mutual Shock sits in conversation with a lineage of outsider electronic music—Drab Majesty’s theatrical alienation, Molchat Doma’s post-Soviet nostalgia, the mechanized introspection of Nine Inch Nails—but avoids being pinned down by any one aesthetic. Powers is less interested in genre homage than he is in emotional architecture. Each sound feels like a corridor leading somewhere disorienting yet familiar, like a half-remembered dream of an office building at night.

Thematically, the album is deeply of this moment. It’s about burnout, yes, but not in the way we meme it. It’s about the deeper erosion beneath the hustle: the spiritual confusion, the existential rootlessness, the constant digital hum that keeps us from ever fully arriving in our own lives. Powers channels these anxieties not with histrionics, but with careful understatement—letting the atmosphere do the heavy lifting. It’s as much sociology as it is art.

What makes Nervous Systems so vital is that it doesn’t offer escape. Instead, it offers recognition. In a time when much of culture aims to distract, Mutual Shock chooses to reflect. Powers holds a mirror to the disquiet and lets it speak—not with panic, but with precision. The result is an album that lingers long after the final note, not as a soundtrack to alienation, but as a language for it.