Tebi Rex, known for their excellent style crossovers and boundary pushing lyrics, are playing their final gig as Tebi Rex in The Button Factory on December 22nd this year. After a decade of carving their own space in Irish music, combining hip-hop, alt-rap, trad, pop and spoken word with sharp social commentary, dark humour, and an impish charm, the beloved duo are bowing out on their terms.
‘Fin.’ is their most poignant project to date: an 11-track album honouring endings in all forms, balancing heavy emotion with trademark wit as they reflect on love, loss, legacy and letting go. Here they look back on their achievements, share memories and answer questions on their farewell album.
‘Fin.’ shows how much hard work and planning went into that album. Has your creation style changed over the years?
Dafe: Actually, it was least curated to me in comparison to the other albums. We focus on story structure, speaking overarching narrative with a start, a middle and end. But Fin was like a feeling we turned into an album. Every song is an individual story arc in a big story.
Matt: This one was funny to me because despite it being simply curated, it was the most free I ever felt while constructing a project.
Dafe: We could’ve swapped some of the orders of the songs and it would have made a speaking difference in the story the album tells. The song order can either improve or ruin an album.
Matt: We were assigned a record label and they wanted to make the songs a single in the EP and put it together in an album afterwards. You can’t do that when you’re creating a concept album. Fin was the final jigsaw puzzle piece we missed in telling our story.
Dafe: Context albums are harder to navigate. It’s easy for a song to hype up one moment and then be forgotten about the next, but it’s harder for people to discover the context as successful songs usually end up in some playlist.
How are you planning your final show? It’s gonna be an emotional experience.
Matt: I’ve felt like this with all the past gigs we had, because we had already said that that was our final album. As soon as we started gigging it hit that we were wrapping this up now. That’s been quite emotional and different songs caught me at different stages of those feelings. It makes me especially melancholic if the crowd responds well. When they catch the vibe, I realize we’ll never get this reaction again. This peaked during our final festival season this summer. Now we’re doing our last gigs in November leading up to the final one.
Dafe: When this last show ends, we’re closing a chapter in Irish Hip Hop. That proper closure is cool because we’re passing the torch on to other artists. There is so much upcoming talent, including artists we have collabed with. That really makes me emotional.
Matt: I could go down a list of people who don’t do music anymore. Like there are many Irish Hip Hop artists we have shared festival stages with who don’t exist anymore. So I think we’re like the last ones on the way concerning that genre.
Do you have any nightmare touring stories?
Matt: Earlier, we got booked for a girl’s sixteenth birthday. That was terrific. We went to Cork and the party was in a barbershop or something. The dad of the girl offered to pick us up. Turns out, the transportation was a limo with all the party guests in the back. So we just had to sit in there with them and the driver couldn’t put music on. So we just sat there in silence getting driven to the venue.
Dafe: It was fucking horrible. It also didn’t pay a lot. The dad ripped us off saying he’d cover our transportation to Cork and ended up not doing that.
If you could change one thing about today’s music industry, what would it be?
Dafe: That question is tricky. Personally, I’m torn because on one side there are numerous things I don’t like, but I’m trying to view things from a different angle. Otherwise I’d be stuck in my own perspective. That’s why before I complain I ask myself: Am I getting old and grumpy
Matt: Like in the past century, you‘d have all these gated communities in music. Today that has faded a little. You got lucky if you got approved at some radio station or label. There were different avenues to success. Now you have to rely on the algorithm. Your career depends on whether you make it on some algorithm generated playlist.
Dafe: A magazine reporting about you could be career defining. Not saying that there is anything wrong with going viral on Tik Tok, but having articles written about you seems more in depth than popping up on peoples’ feeds.
Matt: You have to come up with something novel nowadays. You can‘t solely rely on some aesthetic. As an artist there are many talented people that won’t get lucky because they can’t deliver the fascination of a persona the industry demands. There was this one lad who had one of his music videos blow up and kick off his career.
Dafe: It wasn’t even his best song. You clearly have an advantage if you are a good seller on social media. A magazine writing about you can build immense hype as well though. Now I’m used to hype, which is a shame because I’m probably being a perpetual hype machine. In the industry, let’s diversify what creates hype.
How do you stand on streaming service subscriptions as the primary form of music consumption?
Dafe: I know there is a lot of shit going on with Spotify etc. I still see value in all forms of music consumption. I‘m a fan of streaming.
Matt: Like he said earlier, years ago you’d need a contract with some label to get your career started. Of course, the artists would make a lot more money from selling CDs, vinyls and tapes. Nowadays most is made through concert tickets and merch, the residue from streaming platforms is minimal.
However, the services gave artists the opportunity to independently release music. Still, it’s heartbreaking when you pour so much love into a piece of art and then end up on some Spotify playlist.
Dafe: It‘s just another option to create hype for new artists. I would never advocate for artists to have less options to publish. Even though as a result of those services you‘re not going to have megastars anymore like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé or Michael Jackson because there are too many options to choose from for the consumer. Surely you’re still going to have superstars, but those iconic legends will be hard to reproduce.
On your It‘s Gonna Be Okay album from 2020 you denounce that young peoples’ needs tend to be overlooked in social decisions. Would you say that is still the case or has it improved since Covid?
Dafe: I teach as well and I have students who come to me and say that I make them feel different than other lecturers as I treat them as an equal. Most educators are condescending. I feel like a lot of young peoples‘ needs aren’t getting met because the older generation does not respect them as equals.
Matt: A majority of our audience is women which is weird for a rap group. And I feel like we attract younger people organically because we don’t have this condescension in ourselves Dafe talked about.
Your lyrics are very poetic. Are you planning on continuing poetry after this?
Matt: Definitely. Many rappers started off as poets. Poetry and rapping go hand in hand. I’m definitely gonna keep doing poetry. Through poetry, I express my individual perspective in a hard hitting, honest and bearing way, without cutting corners. Poetry exposes something in me. It shows me how I really think.
Dafe: I think there is still support for poetry. I do poetry. Haven’t done it in a couple of years and getting back into it has been hard. Recently, I got absolutely smoked in a poetry gig. Obviously, I’ve been doing music for years and poetry is a different skill. Still, I don‘t feel like I could release a poetry book or something.
Matt: Why wouldn’t we release a poetry book?
Dafe: Nobody buys poetry books anymore.
Matt: You don’t need that many people to buy it to consider it a success. If you have a hundred streams on Spotify a song is considered a flop, but if you sell a hundred books it’s like a big deal. If we only sold seventy poetry books, that’d be sick.
Are you guys working on anything else at the moment and what can be expected after Tebi Rex has shut down?
Dafe: Maybe I’ll get into music management. I’ll be kicking about there but at the moment I’m focusing on the final show in December. Even though we’re coming to an end with this, we never let something just die. We had a hard time letting Tebi Rex go.
Matt: I’ve been working for Worldwide Studio for some time now and will probably keep doing that. But I’m unsure about moderating again. Not the recording, but the promo and building a profile. I did solo for a little bit and put a few songs out, which was cool because I got my fiancé to DJ. It was nice being on stage with her, but I‘m used to being on stage with him. Maybe…you never know what will happen in the future. I was gonna say shit happened, but that sounds so negative.
Dafe: But it’s accurate. In a positive way.
Words: Nila Uslu
‘Fin.’ is out now. Tebi Rex play their final gig on Mon Dec 22nd in the Button Factory.
Tickets via buttonfactory.ie
