Zomb: First things first, where are you from and how old are you? 

samsraps: Originally I'm from Rhode Island, though I live in Cincinnati now. I just turned 27 a few weeks ago 

Zomb: Big shoutout to RI we love that and happy belated birthday! Tell us a little bit about growing up in Rhode Island and what that was like for you? 

samsraps: It was great man i love RI. Since then ive lived in both st Pete Florida and now Cincinnati, so it’s given me some more perspective on how special RI really is. The culture there made a big impact on me, having grown up around a lot of Italian and Portuguese folks. The Italian stuff sneaks into my raps pretty often. Of course, living near the ocean gave me an affinity for the water, and that’s something that persists. The state is really small as you know, so it’s cool that you can get pretty much anywhere in 20-40 minutes. I played a lot of baseball growing up, which allowed me to see a lot of the state and the neighboring states as well. New England has a special place in my heart 

Zomb: Super well said, I completely feel the same being from MA myself so I know exactly what you mean. It definitely has a special charm to it that you need to see for yourself. In your early years what types of music did you listen to? Who were some of your favorites growing up and what was your early introduction to music like? 

samsraps: Like a lot of people, i got introduced to the earliest stuff from my parents. My dad was big into alt rock, grunge, some rap, and the band Rush. Some of my early favorites were Rush, Coldplay, Death Cab for Cutie, Zox, Pearl Jam. Stuff like that. My dad was always tapped into the lyrics especially, and would sometimes pause the songs to talk through what they meant or what I thought they meant. That kind of unlocked that analytical side for me. As i got into high school, I started getting more into the SoundCloud stuff of that time, especially rappers like Skizzy Mars, Luke Christopher, Cam Meekins, etc. and the dubstep/trap stuff that was coming out too. of course Earl/Tyler/Odd Future. I also remember getting super into MF DOOM & Captain Murphy (aka Flying Lotus), just loved that aesthetic. I’d also poke through audiomack and just download whatever looked cool, so that’s how i got into things like mac’s mixtapes, audio push, etc. Through baseball, i got introduced to country music and was into that for a while, but it faded. College is really where I started going deep into the rap stuff. My freshman year, I got put on to RTJ, Flatbush, Isaiah Rashad, Danny Brown, and stuff like that. Got super hooked and eventually took some courses on hip hop that further cemented my respect for and interest in the genre & culture more widely. 

Zomb: I love that your dad would break down lyrics, that totally makes sense for your interest in that side of music. Additionally that’s such a great timeline early on, your variety was truly massive as a listener. So following college when was your initial interest in recording and creating your own music? 

samsraps: I guess the seed was kind of planted during college. I was in school for Professional Writing, but really my love was poetry. I took a hip hop class in which we had to write some raps, film a music video, and eventually perform in front of the class. I just found the challenge of writing the raps really interesting, and saw it as a way to work on meter for my poetry, so I started doing it on my own time. Then I got out of school, and my plan was to go to graduate school to get my MFA in poetry. Long story short it didn’t work out, and I found myself kinda just twisting in the wind without a writing community or a reason to write. I kept writing raps though. And that was fun. I’d just record them on voice memos acapella or with a beat playing from my computer in the background and send them to my friends. They were supportive of me even though it sounded terrible. I loved the challenge of delivering the bars, and the ability to not only be poetic, but funny or mean or biting too. Then I started getting tapped into hip hop twitter, especially guys like patty honcho, KNOWITALL, the dudes from PENtagon, blank thought, etc etc and I saw the community around it and figured, “hey maybe I’ll try that. I think I can do it as well as them.” Eventually I thought about working with some of my acapellas, but when I sent them over, it quickly became evident how much work I really had to do to get up to par with the guys I was seeing on the timeline, and I’ve been working at it ever since.

Zomb: That’s probably one of my favorite stories I’ve heard in a while. You went from college writing to getting into music off of pure passion for the writing aspect of it. So following that interaction with Blank Thought, what was your next step? You knew you wanted to take it more seriously so what was your next move and what year was this? 

samsraps: I believe we had those initial conversations around march 2023. He saw some potential in the acapellas despite their lack of consistent tempo and agreed to make a project with me. So he started sending me some beats and I started writing new material for them and sending him demos. Through that, I started to understand how much I really didn’t know about the technical side of things—recording, mixing, putting together demos, sending stems, all that. So I started going to YouTube to try to figure it out, which helped a little but truly I’ve learned the most from getting tapped into communities of peers like sosswrld. 

Zomb: Fantastic massive shoutout Blank Thought that’s super sick for you guys to kick off like that. You’re absolutely right tutorials are a great place to start but once you get in there and work with peers you see some things differently. So following your collaboration with Blank Thought, did you already refer to yourself as samsraps or did you go with a different artist name at first? 

samsraps: at first my artist name was s.a.m.s. I had always used sams as my name for extracurricular poetry since high school, and that’s what my family calls me to differentiate me from my dad. However, the formatting proved difficult to standardize across streaming platforms & socials, so I switched to samsraps for the sake of searchability and so it’d be easier for people to remember at open mics or review shows.

Zomb: Super good choice, I love that origin story. Continuing on in 2023/2024, what was your next move? Did you continue to create and release solo material? 

samsraps: Yeah so later in 2023 i started getting tapped into some review shows—specifically The Beat Lounge and The Review Room. I’d submit some of my demos & eventually one of the producers in there asked me to collaborate, so that’s how my first release came about. That one dropped in January 2024. I then started working on Triple Shot, a 3-song EP with worldwide beats, which was my first multi-song release and I think that was the first stuff I submitted to music mondays. 

Zomb: Those early tracks were really something else, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who knew you were on to something special. So following Triple Shot, at what point did you link up with sossworld and start taking that journey?

samsraps: I think I originally joined sosswrld late 2023. That community felt different to me from the jump. Any other discord I joined, there were little convos here and there but not really spaces dedicated to peer review & feedback. But that was a big part of sosswrld and something I had missed from my days in writing clubs at college. Being able to get immediate feedback on stuff from guys way more experienced than me helped me level up quickly. It’s not often you meet guys that are that far ahead of you that take the time to help you grow. But yeah, I just kept ingraining myself there throughout 2024. Got to know UGGGY pretty well and we started talking about really executing the SOSS GANG tape, which we put together in February/March of this year. We just felt like sosswrld had gotten to a point where we knew the core few guys who always show up were good artists that had chemistry and weren’t going away any time soon, so it felt appropriate to start putting together a way to showcase the talent in the group.

Zomb: It really is so important to find some sense of community that you can hold value to in the scene. Big shout out sossworld that’s such a positive part of the journey. So taking us into 2025, you have a pretty major project coming out yourself at this point in time don’t you? Tell us a little bit about your next release.

samsraps: Yeah my next project is definitely my most substantial to date. This one is The Moss & Me, which uses 8 of the instrumentals from UGGGY’s 2024 album The Moss & The Soss. That was a jazzy instrumental album that I came to love, turn to in times of anxiety, or just tune into to space out. UGGGY had always said he created that album kind of hoping that someone would flip it somehow… I think he meant to sample the instruments he played, but I asked him if I could rap on it and he said he liked that idea, so I started writing to them. Several of the songs are cannibalizing verses from an older project that ended up falling through, while some are completely new raps i wrote for this. I’d say generally, the album leans into the main ideas of The Moss & The Soss and then expounds outward. Nature, organic creation, and the beauty of imperfection are some of the things that come to mind for The Moss & The Soss, so i wanted to keep that as a throughline for Moss & Me, while also trying to explore what it means to me to continue to create with seemingly no incentive but the love of it.