Backpack Beats
Walking the edge of dramatic and dreamy while balancing ominous beats with organic elements. (E&E-038)
A good beat is a vehicle for the imagination. It’s the first spray of paint on an unassuming wall. A lo-fi rhythm, a bare bones trap beat, or a sampled breakbeat sets the tone. Those rhythms dictate the direction as the overarching emotion, purpose, dreams, and drama come into focus. Piece by piece, color after color, there’s magic when those rhythmic instincts and emotional elements all come together.
Backpack Beats (E&E-038) builds off hip-hop beats from genres like trap, old skool, and trip hop to create a colorful collage of mysterious, mellow, dramatic, and dreamy scenes. Composed by the team of Julian Anderson, Forrest Reed, and Aaron Wittrock, the album reads like a sketch pad of ideas, exploring the terrain while staying true to a few core ideas. Circling themes of cool confidence and melodramatic romance, the beats provide mood-defining characteristics that the synthesizers and pianos embellish.
Tracks like “On The Top Now” also feature sparse male vocals that narrate a few of the scenes. A few bars of lyrics are all you need, giving a clear voice to the themes. “Detroit Struttin’” hits the old skool hip-hop vibes with horns and a striking guitar riff. Slightly ominous and feeding melodramatic feels, “When I Wake Up” uses jittery flute fills to add a dose of the organic to play off the dreamy atmosphere. As with many of the tracks on this record, the beat acts as an anchor giving the necessary weight or direction to a track.
Just as the character on the album cover sees the world as their canvas, adding vibrancy and life to previously lifeless walls and surfaces, Backpack Beats invites the listener to keep exploring more exciting, inclusive, diverse, genre-bending stories. Whether it be teen dramas, romantic comedies, or a superhero series, using these beat-centric beds to feed new narratives helps paint a new picture.
our music is exclusively available worldwide through Universal Production Music
to find our music in your territory, click here for a list of Universal offices around the globe