Toro Y Moi broke a lot of his own rules while making his latest album, Hole Erth. For his eighth studio album, he wanted to explore more in both a physical and metaphorical sense. Every other record he’s made has been the result of a solitary process occurring within the walls of his bedroom on a laptop. With Hole Erth, Toro Y Moi broke free, visiting multiple studios over the course of its creation and leaving the door open for unexpected collaborations along the way. In a new video interview with Rolling Stone, the musician explains how that shift took him to new creative heights.
“This is the first time I’ve actually taken my Pro Tools sessions from studio to studio, and it was something I wanted to try doing. Being able to hop around studio to studio actually allows for more collaborations, which is a big part of this record,” he explains. “It really helped me just separate from the files. I’m always behind the screen. This record, I wasn’t as much. I felt like I reached a cap on my capacity to handle writing lyrics and thinking outside of what I’ve done and still trying to clean it up. I just wanted that brain space to be taken care of, or just freed. It was with the best move I’ve ever made, honestly.”
For the first time, Toro y Moi was working with actual engineers to sharpen his music. He was also breaking down the barriers he had around sound and genre. “The song ‘Undercurrent’ featuring Don Tolliver and Porsches was probably one of the first tracks I had that really sort of sparked this darker grunge aspect of the record,” he says. “I made that song in, like, 2020, and I was just waiting for the right project. Because at the same time, I was working on Mahal, which is very Seventies psych rock. I knew that I wanted to bring in this 90s angst for a project, so I just saved it.”
Toro y Moi also leaned into inspirations from around the world, citing the music coming out of everywhere from Lagos to Paris. He married those influences with his own upbringing in South Carolina — where he was surrounded by hip-hop — and his time living in Northern California, embracing the old sustainability practices of Sixties and Seventies Bohemia and hippie culture.
“The record this is very much about trying to hold on to yourself in these insane times, of course, but also trying to sort of self-sustain and make the ship float and run correctly and not sink,” Toro y Moi explains. “The parallels are there. Hip-hop has always been this self-sustainable genre. Hole Erth catalogs, were giving out codes. And that’s what hip-hop is. The record cover features stars swirling. I originally took the stars from the 50 states. To me it was like a subtle reference to Americana, to the state of the world. The stars can be seen as a galaxy in outer space, or it can be seen as going down to drain. There’s double entendre there.
Beyond the sound and presentation of the record, Toro y Moi drew significant inspiration for the album from the act of grieving. “Honestly, it’s really good to actually express — with a relevant sort of aspect to it or a purpose — to be upset or feeling unsettled. The actual process of making a record is emotional,” he says. “You’re taking time away from your friends and family to focus on yourself, and hopefully something great comes out of it. So it’s this bittersweet thing, where embracing the darkness and the sadness is just sort of turning it into something beautiful.”
He adds: “There’s this storyline or this through line for the record of this character, this person who’s seen the world, seen things, and they’re reporting back to you their findings and their experiences. That duality that I wanted to sort of point out, as much as I hold onto this modest self, I’m experiencing things in my life … I felt like it’s time to just be myself. I wanted to start the record off as like a Tarantino moment where it’s like, we start with the ending but then immediately we go to the very beginning of the story, Hole Erth.”
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