The king of unreleased music finally released a full length album for the first time.
Hekler's first album, Abyss dropped this Friday on Bassrush. It's a ten track masterclass.
As one of the dons of the trap scene, Hekler is so important to the health of that genre. This newest album showed us exactly why it was worth the wait.
We had a few years where the trap legend did not release any music, but he started going viral in 2022 for his series on TikTok with a clip of one unreleased song per day. This series showed the absolute heaters to come—and that's precisely what we received.
The album is split into two acts and has the feel of something that has been a long time coming for Hekler. He told us a little bit about how he arrived at the album we got.
“A couple years ago, I was supposed to put out an album that fell through and never really saw the light of day. I had spent countless hours going back to the basics and sort of re-teaching myself everything I knew but in a totally different way. A couple weeks go by, and I decide to start a new record that represents a new ‘creative journey.’ I had no prior planning or ideas, so I kind of just dived in head first, Hekler said. Hence the title Abyss: Jumping into the unknown. Each song on this project has a different, and somewhat raw, feel to each of them. I wanted to capture the essence of how it felt in the room while I was first starting these songs. I really wanted my first big project to show me as an artist in all ways, so I ended up taking on the design and art portion into my own hands, as well.
The album continued to show Hekler's versatility, too. While we got some ear scorching trap tunes, the second half of the album leaned into the rap music crossover we hear so often in Hekler's music. He had several features on the second act of the project, which is where we had the rap influences on full display. Here's what he had to say about it.
The features on this project are some of my favorites that I’ve had the pleasure of working on. One of the first singles on the record is TILL I DIE with Glenwood! and KANIN; such an insane tune. Then, we’ve got Bank with my fellow Vegas native, Sam King. On In My Bag with Frankie Sinn, we met during a tour stop in Atlanta and just immediately vibed. And finally, my boy Dnd Roxy. We go back a bit and have tons of songs together that you all will hear soon. But we wanted to add a crazy abrasive tune to our folder, so we started Whiplash.
Overall, while we still have the trappy influences we've always known from Hekler, this album took a creative leap for a producer who clearly has spent years re-imagining his sound. He left us with this.
All in all, Abyss is the project where I tried a new technical approach to what I do. This is the first batch of music where I really went back to my roots of heavier music, but still took a fresh approach.
We'll have this one on repeat until further notice and suggest you do the same.
Dubstep news reporter Dustin Fletcher can be found on Twitter.
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