Hard Guitars, Sharp Rap, Zero Apology

Somewhere in Saarbrücken—an industrial city near the French border that gets less credit than it deserves—rapper Lucy and producer Deon have been building something that doesn’t fit anywhere neatly. Tiavo blend hard rock guitar with hip-hop in a way that sounds like a trend piece waiting to happen, except they’re better than trend pieces deserve to be. Their debut album Oh Lucy arrived with a coherence you don’t usually get from that kind of genre collision: hard riffs, rap verses, actual singing, and all of it moving in the same direction.

German hip-hop—Deutschrap—has spent the last decade becoming one of the most commercially dominant music scenes in Europe, which has given it all the problems commercial dominance tends to bring: formula, saturation, a narrowing of what’s considered acceptable. Tiavo sound like a refusal of that. Songs like "Wah Wah Wah" and "Take Me Back To Woodstock" are about the grind of trying to get somewhere, gratitude and exhaustion sitting right next to each other. "Nichts aus Gold" and "Hey Ma" go darker—the machinery of the music business, what it costs—without any self-pity, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

They’ve toured with Machine Gun Kelly, Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, and NF, which tells you they can hold a stage alongside people operating at a much higher level of visibility. That experience shows in the new EP. Bitte Lächeln—"Please Smile"—sounds more traveled than Oh Lucy. The single "Shit On Your Grave" has Post Malone’s melodic blur around the edges and something of XXXTentacion’s jagged emotional frequency. More polished and more unsettled at the same time. Tiavo launched as the first act on the Outta This World label, which Genetikk founded in late 2017, and it seems like the label is actually giving them room to develop rather than just replicating what worked last time. That’s rarer than it should be.