Within a year, both members of the hip-hop duo received devastating news. They held each other up, and made their most personal record yet
Growing up, Adit Gauchan was taught that life is suffering. Raised a Buddhist, the producer – who comprises
Sydney hip-hop group Horrorshow alongside rapper Nick Bryant-Smith – absorbed this central tenet of the religion from an early age. “Sometimes people hear that and they’re like, ‘Oh that’s such a dark, depressing way to look at things.’ It’s more just an acknowledgement of what life is. That’s a certainty: there will be suffering, and it’s about what you do with it that really counts.”
Gauchan and Bryant-Smith leaned on these ideas – and one another – in the two years since their last record, Bardo State, was released in 2017. Six weeks after the album came out, a person very close to Bryant-Smith was diagnosed with stage-four bowel cancer. His priority for the next two years became surgeries and treatment, rather than the touring and press that would normally follow a release.