He and Sweatshirt first connected via MAVI just a few months before the materialization of “EL TORO.” What began as “just another beat with some weak ass drums,” quickly evolved into the now-viral track, Kast revising the initial loop just once before sending it to both rappers individually. “MAVI hit me back with his verse and he sent it to Earl also, who was like ‘Wait, I have something to that too,’ so they both sent their verses to me,” and that was the first and final version of the song that’s now racked up over 13 million streams. “Earl really championed me.”
Validated from the song’s success, Kast followed up with his first solo studio project, Try Again — a sonic soundscape of his “uncomfortableness.” “I couldn’t be who I wanted to be, and that was my best attempt at doing it,” he says. With features from old friend demahjie, old-ish friend MAVI, and new friends Pink Siifu and Navy Blue (whom he met through MAVI), the nine-track project is a raw encapsulation of Kast’s struggle. He then wrote an album that he never dropped called CLOSURE, a COVID- created confrontation of all that was weighing on him, on which he “fleshed out of every single difficult thing in life.” To this day, it remains unfinished, but the rapper believes it was meant to stay as such, the project more of a vehicle for his inner monologue instead of for public consumption.
Admittedly, the self-described “lazy perfectionist” never really knows when something is finished, theorizing he could’ve added more to each one of his projects. After Try Again and its deluxe came 2023’s six-track RESET! and 2024’s KASTGOTWINGS collab mixtape with Cardo Got Wings, the projects punctuated by notable Messiah x MAVI x Kast collab “silent heel,” and the two tracks he produced for Drake’s For All The Dogs Scary Hours Edition, “Red Button” and “The Shoe Fits.”
“Drake didn’t pick the beats I thought he was going to pick, but that’s the beauty of it,” he says, stating the key to producing for another artist is letting the artist lead. It’s taken the rapper a while to gain the confidence to play his beats for other artists, keeping it real when he says, “There’s no way to get over the uncomfortableness. You just have to get over the embarrassment of showing somebody something. There’s no how. You just have to do it. You have to embarrass yourself.”
As he does with all of his creative pursuits, the rapper “had [his] thumb on everything” related to While The Iron Is Hot, producing almost everything on the album and even having a hand at video editing. This was a key theme of the listening party panel, on which his Creative Director Kufu sat next to him. Kast explains the pair’s symbiotic synergy, the rapper providing his most honed-in vision yet, and Kufu helping him materialize it.
Kast keeps digital archives and playlists of things that inspire him, but for this album specifically, he kept a Milanote of everything he wanted to accomplish. An organized compilation of videos, to-do lists, quotes, songs, and other media, the project’s inspi- ration board features 1970s Japanese horror film House, Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and documentary-short “Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama.”
“I was really on it,” Kast says. “I knew what I wanted to happen […] You don’t need money to make something happen. What you need is a good vision and good people.” In addition to MAVI, While The Iron Is Hot also features Samara Cyn, summer tourmate Saba, and fellow Oaklander Vince Staples, whom he met with Maxo at Camp Flog Gnaw 2024.
While what Kast deems his most focused sonic offering yet continues to do numbers, the rapper finds himself at the most underground he’ll ever be again.
But no matter how many hip-hop heavyweight cosigns he lands, how close he veers into the mainstream, or how many miles he strays from East Oakland, his energy remains the same; it’s what filled the four walls of the Carhartt WIP store, permeated the air at Marsha P. Johnson, and guides every lyric he writes. His energy is his greatest commodity, and he’ll continue to nurture it with visits home, watching Harry Potter with his girlfriend, and walks in the park. Lots of visits home.
