Stevie Durag is an artist and producer based in Alabama, with wide-reaching collaborations throughout the underground music scene from smaller acts such as New Jersey’s Big Ouee to artists teetering on the mainstream such as the PNW’s own Astral Trap. Born in Minnesota, Stevie Durag began making music ten years ago, building his own unique brand of dark trap-influenced production and eventually beginning to share said music a few years ago. The initial growth was slow, but since the late 2010s, Durag has been making a name for himself in the underground community with his versatility and chameleonic approach to working with artists of all styles as well as his frequent coverage from the UK-based blog 108MICS. Tapes such as ‘The Stevie Files, Vol. 1’ and the excellent collaborative tape ‘Return to the Slab’ with rapper Cybernetic Snake showcase both his musical prowess and adaptability, with the former featuring a wider range of styles and influences and the latter being a master class in artist-producer collaboration. Durag’s versatility is further shown in his latest EP, the six-track ‘Road Warrior’, where he assembles an international ensemble of artists to feature on his magnificent homage to the ever-growing Michigan rap scene. 

Inspired by Michigan mainstays such as Trapboy 3k and Danny G, Durag wanted to encapsulate the wide array of sounds within the Michigan scene, weaving the darker, horror-inspired style he’s perfected through each city's unique brand of uptempo trap. Each track takes influence from one of many dialects of the subgenre– while they’re all mutually intelligible and recognizable as the “Michigan sound”, some incorporate the fast pianos and synth basslines of Detroit trap while others put emphasis on the haunting pads, slower keys, and gritty 808s of Flint’s growing scene. To further explain the differences and nuances between each track on ‘Road Warrior’ and their relationship to the local Michigan scenes, a closer look will be taken at the production throughout the EP as well as exploring the plethora of features that the artist has brought together.

On the first song, ‘Bout It’, Detroit-based rapper Blood Money acts as the lone feature over a menacing beat; the instrumental is recognizably Michigan with a slightly slower tempo, accentuating the haunting atmosphere of the track. The signature thin hi-hats and thick, dreary pads with an array of glitchy accent percussion comprise the beat, underscored by a powerful-yet-subtle 808, creating a simple but effective backdrop to Blood Money’s formidable performance. It’s hard to place this instrumental into a specific local scene as Durag’s darker production style shares many qualities with both the Flint and Detroit sounds, but I would categorize this as closer to the gloomy, slower aspects of the growing Flint scene. The trench-deep timbre of the artist's voice along with the sheer confidence in his delivery immediately cement the sinister mood of the track, his verse hitting right away with a bouncy flow that alternates between short staccato bars and rapid-fire triplets. These oscillating cadences create a sense of movement and tension throughout the song, occasionally broken up by his catchy repeated refrain (“All my —-s, they bout it!”) which was immediately stuck in my head for about a week after my first listen. Despite his actually being from Michigan, I find his flow on ‘Bout It’ to be more reminiscent of some select Atlanta artists (Takeoff– rest in peace– immediately comes to mind), although still blended with the unique rhyme schemes and smooth syllabic structures born from the Michigan scene he inhabits. The mix on this particular song is clean but claustrophobic in a captivating manner, much like the sounds coming from many Memphis artists past and present, giving ‘Bout It’ quite the interesting blend of stylistic influences and choices that come together to create a spine-chilling Michigan anthem. I genuinely hope to hear a full-length album from them as I’d love to see Stevie’s experimentation with the Michigan style and Blood Money’s inherently tough performances develop further.

The following track, ‘Mad Max’ (featuring Big Ouee and DJ Lucas), brings out a significantly heavier version of the production style Durag showcased on ‘Bout It’-- the melodic structure is quite similar, tense pads opening up the track as Stevie’s signature tags play. The rhythm of the drums is less dense, but the resulting rhythmic space only serves to add more tension as the thundering bass immediately occupies the low end to its limits, giving Big Ouee the platform to steal the show right away with the first verse. His delivery is relaxed, each bar floating over the beat in a controlled manner much like many other rappers from the scene, but with his own signature disaffected cadence that fluctuates in tone between each punch-in. Big Ouee’s performance on this song reminds me somewhat of certain plugg/plugg-adjacent artists (curiously enough, RXKNephew comes to mind) where bars overlap in certain areas and clash with backing vocals at times, but between his sharp lyrical content and catchy flow, it doesn’t detract from his verse or the song as a whole. While it’s not the most precise style of rapping I’ve ever heard, the personality comes through so strongly that it becomes great in its own right and provides a unique contrast with the unnerving atmosphere of the beat and his carefree, braggadocious bars. Stevie Durag states that he crafted this instrumental for Ouee to accentuate his “raw and gritty” style, and it does so exquisitely. About halfway through ‘Mad Max’, Ouee’s final bars lead perfectly into the verse from Massachusetts-based artist DJ Lucas as the latter artist adopts a similar flow– for about five seconds on my first listen, I thought Ouee was performing in a different vocal register, but DJ Lucas starts turning up right away with a raspy delivery packed full of raw energy. Bars like “I used to take fitteds from the lost and found!” can come off as humorous at first but in the context of his full verse, it just ends up sounding insanely hard. You can hear Lucas’ hunger just through the way he belts his bars; at times, he can slide off of the beat just due to the aggression in his voice, but it never distracts from the song or makes his performance feel lesser. Instead, like Ouee, it just adds to their grittiness and spirited styles that Durag wanted to showcase and adds a level of intensity to their bars– without the pinpoint vocal rhythms of a lot of mainstream MI rap, the instrumental takes a different role in the structure of the song, moreso setting the mood and tone of the track rather than being the glue that holds it all together. That being said, ‘Mad Max’ is a rare breed of banger that I’ve had on repeat since I first heard this EP and fits really nicely in the sequence of the project, retaining the chilling atmos and lyrical content that ‘Bout It’ initiated while offering a bit more humor and personality throughout both verses.

Oakland’s own SMB Blurr features on the following song, ‘Interstate 40’, sliding more into the Bay Area’s sound which shares many characteristics of the Michigan scene; many artists from the Bay and Michigan tend to collaborate due to these similarities. Blurr slides immediately over the Durag-produced instrumental, with his double-tracked vocals floating over the beat in a similar manner to Ouee and Lucas although with a bit more cohesion, broken up by the slightly-altered cadences between each vocal track. His flow is laidback, reminiscent of other modern Bay artists, but I’m hesitant to compare him to anyone in particular– like the other artists on this EP, Durag has found an artist that pulls from their regional influences while creating a style of their own. Blurr never really deviates from his delivery from the top to the bottom of the track, but due to the brevity of ‘Interstate 40’ (coming in at a tight minute and thirty seconds), it never gets repetitive. The placement of this song in the tracklist vaguely reminds me of Earl Sweatshirt’s interlude on the Vince Staples LP ‘FM!’, where the artist comes to deliver a hard-hitting verse over an absolute earworm of a beat. The subject matter follows the same lines as the last, with the refrain towards the end of the song exemplifying Blurr’s authenticity in a scene full of less-than-serious artists. The beat itself has quite an ambient structure; droning pads dominate the melodics of the instrumental while light, bellish keys add movement. The drums fall further into the background than any other on this song, making Blurr’s voice the highlight of the song much like many of the cuts on Veeze’s 2023 album ‘Ganger’, a creative decision that I find smart due to the subdued delivery shared by both artists.