The only thing more dangerous than making the jump from a career in a prominent indie rock band to a rap project is making the jump from a career in a prominent indie rock band to a rap project after recently achieving ubiquitous meme status due to a particularly colorful performance on Letterman. In 2014, seeing a .GIF of Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring doing something surprising with his body on the Ed Sullivan Theater stage totally removed from its source was on par with the equally viral snippets of Nic Cage freaking the fuck out in Vampire’s Kiss—a great movie that’s fallen victim to the merciless decontextualization inherent to social media. Its source, by the way, was an incredibly vulnerable song about an ill-fated relationship Herring had been struggling to process when the track came together.
But in spite of the hurt he felt with the reaction to his band’s network TV debut, his next move was another jarring display of vulnerability that could easily come across as prime meme fodder: he became a rapper. In 2015 alone, he recorded an EP with Madlib, and his name—well, his moniker Hemlock Ernst, which I suppose isn’t immediately recognizable as belonging to Herring unless you’re clued in to his moonlighting gig—popped up on two LPs from the artist currently known as R.A.P. Ferreira (one under his former alias Milo, the second as his beats-focused alter-ego Scallops Hotel), a Busdriver mixtape, and the one-off collaboration between Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti. While all four of these rappers have reputations as jokesters, that last release in particular taps into the dark subject matter both Mike Eagle and Geti tend to let seep into their music with Ernst matching their mood with surprising ease.
And dude totally held his own between dizzyingly wordy guest verses from P.O.S. and Busdriver on that Cavanaugh track. I think at the time—notably in a post–I’m Still Here world—it was just because it seemed so hard to believe that this guy was actually taking a rap project seriously that I had a hard time accepting it as anything beyond a gimmick, like a sophomore-slump Know Your Meme entry, or a more committed version of Paul Banks’ rap bit a decade earlier. But in the next two years his name kept popping up on releases I was listening to, from OME’s next collaboration with Paul White to an apocalyptic single with the then-mostly-unknown JPEGMAFIA in a gesture of support for his local Baltimore music scene. His raspy flow even made an appearance on a massive recordings dump from Anticon O.G. Passage—marking the first time I heard him outside the context of his pals in Hellfyre Club or on a project with local ties—and later that year you could hear him on a billy woods loosie preceding that rapper’s cultural takeover with and outside of Armand Hammer.
And just about every year since then I’ve bumped into Hemlock on an album I’ve been listening to, like running into one of those guys who travels in the same social circles as you, whose reputation makes him a little too intimidating to ever really talk to. In 2018 he nailed a verse on a track from another up-and-coming rapper from the Baltimore scene, Butch Dawson; in 2019 he joined Aesop Rock collaborator Blockhead for a verse on his solo album; in 2020 he was featured on a track by West Coast rap cult figures Fatlip and Blu; and most recently he closed out a cut on the new AJ Suede LP, following a Ceschi verse with a heartbreaking meditation on the twin lonelinesses of touring life and pandemic isolation.
Looking through this long list of guest verses, there’s never really any indication that he’s hoping to land a spot that will propel “Hemlock Ernst” to the name recognition of his wonky new wave band, despite that group clearly providing him with the means of grabbing the attention of someone like, say, Danny Brown. Instead there’s a curiously strong and probably intentional overlap between the artists he works with and those filling out his personal Bandcamp collection, which—alongside a profile pic of Herring's face photoshopped over a tatted-up Ryan Gosling in Place Beyond the Pines counting cash—casually lists as its mission statement: “Support music cuz i'm a fan.”
And there’s a certain modesty in steering clear from verses on A-list releases which seems to go hand-in-hand with the subtlety of his guest spots, many of which have crept up and slowly become my favorite part of many of those songs listed above. It may seem ironic that when Ernst finally revealed his debut album (and to this day, his only release) under the moniker in 2019, the only collaborator on the project was Kenny Segal, who’d produced it—but then again that seems to fall in line with the moniker’s persona of flying under the radar, opting out of drawing any additional attention to this fairly bedroom-recordings-sounding LP in which the songwriter can finally stretch his wings as a wordsmith outside of the maudlin choruses of Future Islands.
I guess this all came full-circle earlier this week when Future Islands returned to the Late Show stage—with Stephen Colbert filling in as a much less enthusiastic cheerleader for the retired David “I’ll Take All of That You’ve Got” Letterman—to strut their stuff even more confidently than they had nearly a decade ago. Maybe this bodes well for the future of Hemlock Ernst, too—I’d love to see Sam Herring perform a guest-heavy rap set after taking the stage with that Paddington-esque peacoat. FL
