On Friday night, some of the finest musicians of the outer borough hip-hop underground descended on Nublu in the East Village. Although not billed as such, the evening was practically a mini-fest proving loud and clear that Brooklyn and Queens are still fostering emcees brimming with lyrical brilliance.
First up was Nappy Nina, an Oakland native who has repped Brooklyn for quite some time. Decked out in denim and an Oakland A’s cap, the rapper spit rhymes while bopping around the stage and gesturing towards the crowd. Her flow is so fast that it was hard to decipher every word but her tracks amped up the audience.
The next act was WRENS, whose show this was. Performing songs off their album, Half of What You See (2025, Out of Your Head Records), from November, the Brooklyn quartet blasted a jazz-rap-noise-punk hybrid that that may very well be of its own kind. This is a group, like TV On the Radio about 20 years prior, that steps on a scene and not only mixes genres but stretches them to their limits. The band’s musicianship is so deft, however, that all of their songs emerge fluidly.
WRENS consists of Elias Stemeseder on synths and una corda piano, Lester St. Louis on cello and electronics, and Jason Nazary on drums and synths, but it is frontman, Ryan Easter, who particularly stands out.
Wearing a Rolling Stones cap and a “We Got the Jazz” tee, Easter paced the stage like a rocker even as he coolly played his trumpet and, at times, shouted his verses. “I heard the devil wears Prada,/I got a maggot in the booth,” went one. “Easy to live it,/Loving is wicked,” went another. Delivered in his deep voice, as though rising from a well, his words shot through the low light of Nublu before hitting ears like mini-rockets.
A Richmond, Virginia native who moved to Brooklyn in 2021, the thirty-three-year-old Easter has already established himself in NYC’s jazz scene as both a sideman and a leader. Just the night before the Nublu show, for example, he played in the Anna Webber/Angela Morris Big Band concert at Roulette on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (along with Out of Your Head founder, Adam Hopkins, on bass).
A few weeks before the Roulette set, he led his Trap Music Orchestra at The Jazz Gallery in the Flatiron District. Before the Nublu show, sitting at the venue’s upstairs lounge, he estimated that he was “in nine groups right now.” Of all his projects, WRENS is an indisputable highlight, in large part due to Easter’s words and vocal delivery.
“Extra extra: Can you even read about it?,” he raps early on Half of What You See, capturing a certain kind of New York where everyone’s rushing for the morning paper and the news hits even before the first sip of coffee. Yet Easter’s creative process is much more intuitive than his almost telegrammatic lyrics might lead one to believe.
“The way WRENS has always made music is not really trying or second-guessing,” he says. “We just play, record, listen back, and things sound coherent, good enough for us, and we kind of leave it for what it is. Sometimes, we chop things up in post and patch them together in different ways. Sometimes, I have things already written without approaching them musically.” Easter goes on to admit, “There’s a lot of word soup in there, but it always makes sense to me.”
During the WRENS set, Easter tossed such verses as, “Every day a martyr,/That is how the show goes,” and, “Puppy to the bone,/’Til he chewing to the marrow.” Towards the end of Half of What You See, Easter spit, “Mary the Moment,/Stalling is Joseph,” and, “Please make my aim,/Give my demons Cheney aim,/David Blaine’d em for the record.”
What does it all mean? What is Easter, really, saying? It doesn’t quite matter, except that his words themselves hit as hard as life does.
Closing act, E L U C I D, a prince of the NYC hip-hop underground, hit just as hard. Playing tracks from across his output, the Queens rapper performed one especially forceful song, “The World Is Dog,” the lyrics of which go, “Fang bite, dog breath,/Short leash, pit fight.”
Yes, the world is “dog,” so, as these artists seem to instruct, check your head, and have a heart.
