The beginning of the pandemic was a weird time for all of us, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of folks leaned into that weirdness with quite the force of rapper Bryson the Alien and electronic duo Pioneer 11, who crossed their beams for a guest-heavy debut collaborative album they lovingly call “weird hip-hop for weird people.” Under the name Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon, the trio—split between Portland, where Bryson’s based, and LA, where Pioneer 11 call home—unleashed Casual Abductions yesterday, with the familiar voices of Open Mike Eagle, Fat Tony, and Lil B wafting through the deep-trip track list.
“We’ve been internet friends since 2019, but when the pandemic hit, we immediately bonded over a desire to make a new kind of hip-hop detached from the mainstream,” the group shares. “We recorded remotely in the late spring of 2020. It was a really prolific period for us, often recording two to three songs a day with beats crafted from THC-infused live jams and cerebral raps guided by psilocybin microtrips and ultimately inspired by our efforts to make sense of the world changing around us.”
Among the album’s guests are a handful of POW Recordings labelmates and alums, including Chester Watson, Fatboi Sharif, Kent Loon, and Archibald Slim, the last of whom appears in the new visual for the track “Georgia O’Keeffe,” in which he drops a smooth verse in between Bryson’s quiet flow intertwining with the oh-shit-this-stuff-really-is-strong production. In case the THC infusion and psilocybin experimentation didn’t come through in the recordings—it most certainly did, for the record—check out the ripped visual for the track below.
You can also stream the full album here:
