Premiere - Astro Syte - T 人 N D 人
Today we’re pleased to debut the sophomore LP from up and coming Edmonton hip-hop artist Astro Syte, AKA Patrick Tanda. This is the first time we’re covering Astro Syte, after missing out on his 2021 album Neo-Tokyo. The follow-up, T 人 N D 人, features a series of collaborations with Tanda at the center of the whole project, masterminding tracks that run the gamut from the pop-influenced single “FALLING FOR (ft. Jillian Treidler)”, to the more old-school vinyl sample that forms the backbone of “23’ TILL INFINITY”.
The album opens with the absolutely stunning “MT. RONÉ” (a Pokémon reference, believe it or not), which opens with a piano loop and a cloud of harmonized vocals, before sinking into an atonal piano and string instrumental break. The song builds until a break around the 3 minute mark, and then Tanda lets loose, with an increasingly dense and intense series of verses, until he finds a peaceful place to land and end the track. The verses across the second half of the song hint at the themes that Tanda is preoccupied with across the whole LP; class, identity, family, and ambition are all front and center across the whole record, and Tanda weaves all of these ideas today with a virtuosity that is stunning for an artist that is still at the very beginning of his career.
The full album comes out tomorrow, July 19th, and can be streamed in full below. Of course, it can also be pre-ordered via Bandcamp; it is not to be missed.