As an Austin native, Rob From Garden Street’s tastes are the evolving sum of a hundred festival lineups. Having grown up with a love of ‘90s hip-hop, he began making beats in the late ‘00s, prompted by the illegally downloaded catalogs of Kanye West, J Dilla, and MF Doom. Confronted daily with the increasingly compromised identity of his East Austin neighborhood, Rob cites beatmaking as his chosen coping mechanism, sometimes withdrawing for weeks at a time to curate drum kits, source samples, and emerge with experimental new material to test on local showcases such as Austin Instrumental Music Fest, Imaginary Stereo, and Exploded Drawing.

Post-Love, Rob’s first release on the Insect Records label, was provoked by his revulsion towards the plethora of disposable relax/study beats he now finds traumatically intolerable ever since breaking up with his own cat-owning despondent girl in a sweater. Produced over a single year, the tape serves as a “soundtrack to catharsis and the shedding of old skin.”

Post-Love’s 17 song collection adds a kinetic, electrical burned complexity to the analog boom-bap formula, departing from the standard breakbeats and chops that defined the dusty, crate-digging sound of Rob’s early bumps. From the swarming, percussive blitz of its opening song—samples scorched beyond algorithmic recognition—the tape’s decidedly un-chill track list sidesteps the contemporary interpretation of lo-fi as low energy, instead offering an exciting mix of melodic influences at a Ritalin’s BPM, ranging from the aggressively off-kilter to the downright symphonic.

An invigorating ear-feast for fans of Dabrye’s Two/Three, Metal Fingers, and Adult Swim in ‘06.

Releases May 1st, 2020.