Local Miscreant Group 'Bomb Squad' Blows Up indieAnthro HQ and Holds Staff Hostage

For the first time in a minute, Will was absent from the office on vacation. This left the group collectively in charge of operations at indieAnthro. The day was normal enough, me and Clementine were picking daisies in the back of the complex. Then these fucking hooligans came and literally blew up the front of the building and stuck the place up. They said something about an album..? 'ilysm rapper', 'creepy susie', something about a 'rough patch'? Their name was 'Bomb Squad', fittingly enough. They didn't demand money, just an interview. Not sure what they wanted exactly but me and Clem eventually relented and gave them one.

The ONE DAY Will's gone and the entire front half of our building is just kaput. Fuuucking hell.

Clementine Converse: What's the ethos of Bomb Squad?

creepysusie: I think we just wanted to have fun and put on a fun show. We didn't want to get bogged down with different concepts or trying to coordinate on saying something in particular, although we did talk about a few different "concepts." I think early on I suggested the cover artwork feature us all as cartoon characters of some kind, and Caleb sent this picture of himself as a little bomberman type guy. So later, i was writing and I referred to him as "bomberman" in a line, and I pulled this "bomb squad" sample from an AVGN episode. And then it kinda hit me, then I suggested it and we all pretty much immediately slipped into it. It just kinda made sense.

ilysm: To me it was just to go stupid. When I initially pitched this project to Suz and Caleb, I was just trying to do a 5 song EP we could get out for August. No name in mind, no specific art direction, nothin'. I think we clicked like magic somehow, it was a one in a million chance. Caleb was dropping a beat or two daily, and in 1-2 business days me n' Susie would have verses over them. Everything just fell into place naturally, we were all in total sync. The 'ethos' kinda built itself with this album as we went along.

roughpatch: I feel like my production has been disregarded for quite a while and I saw this tape as an opportunity to show off a side of myself musically that is absent on my Spotify page. My last project was composed of drumless sample loops, which was vastly different from the beats on Bomb Squad, but I have been producing in this style for years. Both ily and Susie are huge inspirations of mine and compliment my production style in a beautiful way. Brings a tear to my eye.

Melissa Thyme Monroe: Bomb Squad feels really cartoony in an appreciable way. It’s like you took some of the wackier rappers in the scene and put them into one album, features and all. Do you think that’s a conscious decision?

creepysusie: Me and Aether both like to be humorous when we write and we both knew that going in, so I think we were both excited to get the chance to play off each other with the goofiness. We didn't really talk about it too much explicitly but I think we all wanted to make a project that would be an upper and not a downer, so in that way it is like a cartoon.

ilysm: I would say I'm a bit of a goofy rapper. Same with Caleb n' Suz, we all have a bit of a comedic air to what we do n always have–You cant be a good rapper if you cant land a joke. You can't fake that. but as a group? I think we brought the best out of each other. I haven't gotten this silly on a record in a long time and I think Susie really helped in pushing me to be more comfortable with that because dear lord they washed me on "Grilled Cheese Sandwich".

creepysusie: Something I expressed early on was that i wanted us to think real hard about who we were featuring, and try to collab with artists who we really admired and felt were underappreciated, people who we really wanted to put the spotlight on. lulamoon was one of the first names that came up, I suggested Altair Kareem early on too.

roughpatch: I wouldn't say the features are wacky, but they certainly come from many different places sonically. I was glad to rap on the outro. I had a ton of fun loading my SP404 with sound effects (a lot of them from Bomberman games) and spamming them all over. I feel like this contributed heavily towards the (cartoony) aesthetic that you mentioned. The tags seem sporadic, but are very carefully placed.

CC: The chemistry all three of y’all have is apparent. How has roughpatch’s production style and humor played into the creation of the album (i.e. beat names, voice samples, tags, etc.)?

ilysm: Honest to God, Caleb's beats reminded me a lot of how I was producing in 2020, so rapping on these felt like home. Same with the couple prods they passed me for ily solos. It felt so natural to be hitting these beats, and even all the tagging in post was something I used to do too. It feels a lot like a return to form for me but better, because Caleb is so much better at producing than I was back then. Caleb IS Bomb Squad.

creepysusie: Caleb is the star of the whole show, none of it could have happened without him. He went the extra mile even with regards to incorporating stuff we wanted to hear and our ideas into the beats.

MTM: roughpatch, you have this unique production style that exists between oddball trap and a sorta drum machine style. Did you have any specific influences coming into Bomb Squad?

roughpatch: I have spent time practicing the creation of bap and trap beats separately and have been working on solidifying my own fusion of those two styles. I really love a fat 808 that almost drones in the background. Currently, my biggest inspirations are Injury Reserve, Zelooperz, GFOTY, SOPHIE, and Vayda.

CC: Between creepysusie, ilysm, and all of the features, everyone comes with their own style of delivery, giving each song their own sound. When y’all are writing, how do you decide the tone and themes of the track?

ilysm: I think 90% of the time we were just freestyling about bullshit and having a blast, and I think that fun really comes through. or in the case of "Oral Sex", I just hit the group chat like "hey this ones called "Oral Sex", don't hit the beat 'till I do, I have a really good bar, just trust me on this, please thanks."

creepysusie: A lot of what we do when we're writing is playing off the instrumental itself. So in a way Caleb decided a lot of the tone of everything. There were a handful of tracks that were just named, somewhat randomly, and then we kinda just extrapolated on the name.

MTM: So what inspired that bit on 'Grilled Cheese Sandwich' with the sound effects?

roughpatch: That's all Susie. She went off and left it up to me to fill in the gaps. That's probably my favorite moment on the tape. That whole verse is incredible. I see it as the rap version of a drum solo.

creepysusie: That was just something that came to me as I was writing. I always wanted to do some back and forth shit like that between the DJ and the MC.

CC: With lines like “We gon’ have this tape done before the end of the month” on ‘Mwahaha’ and “every time the tape done, it’s another song / They gon' need a cattle prod to tear me off the fuckin' bong” on "Bandsplain", it seems like it this album was worked on non-stop until submitting it to distros. How did y’all know when this project was ready for release?

roughpatch: Honestly, its been good enough to call done for a minute. I was just having fun making music. It would not have been challenging to add 5-10 more songs; I have never experienced a workflow this efficient and consistent before this.

ilysm: A good bar S1uz had of a similar caliber was "You spent a year n a half makin' what we made in just 7 days, shit is baffling". Because at this point we recorded like.. 6? 8? tracks in about a week in late July, thinking that'd be the record. I just thought it was funny to keep mentioning it as we added more and more tracks on the tail end. We had decided it was done with a much shorter tracklist, but had a hard time figuring out what would be the penultimate track before "Les Enfants Terribles". This lead to Caleb making like, another 10 beats for the record so we could pick a good one for that part, which lead to me starting another 5 songs for the record including "Bandsplain". After THAT we decided it was good n' done.

MTM: Do y’all consider yourselves or this album “furry”? ilysm seems to have been getting furrier with each album cycle, lula’s on this album and roughpatch works with her…

creepysusie, who shall henceforth be called creepyfuzzie as divine punishment: I was tryna make a fursona for the album cover so we could cash in on that furry money but I just couldn't see it. I can't front, I'm not about the fur stuff. I love y'all tho. I'm glad we got deerlysm in the mix.

ilysm: These guys were too pussy to make fursonas for the cover. I was FIGHTING for my lil' deer shorty to be on there. ZachJaDa, God bless their soul, had to redraw the earliest sketch of the cover cause they drew me as a cat and I got all up in the cut like "ummmmmmm actuallyyyyy".

roughpatch, who is currently going through the process of being assigned his fursona by the government: I am very furry adjacent. Nearly all of my friends are. I don't have a fursona but I really get it and I would like to eventually.

CC: Is Bomb Squad an album or mixtape?

ruffpatch: Album, for sure.

creepyfuzzie: It's a bomb.

ilysm: It's the bomb.

Bomb Squad by ilysm, creepysusie and roughpatch is out now on streaming services.