Chasing Fridays: FearDorian Q&A, smokedope2016, Find My Friends, more

What I like most about writing the Chasing Fridays newsletter each week is that it's mine. I can write about whatever music I want in whatever format I please. For instance, if I want to go in on a rising underground rapper like smokedope2016 in the same article where I wax poetic on Pittsburgh's pride for regional beatdown stalwarts, then I can do that (see below). If I want to chat with rapper-producer FearDorian about screamo in the same blog post where I paste a text message thread with my friend about a rising emo band, then I can do that.

I feel fortunate to be able to write about and engage with so many different styles of music each week, and I'm grateful for everyone who appreciates the wide range of artists who I cover in this newsletter. I also appreciate websites like Stereogum for letting write things in my own voice and from my own perspective, like my review of Turnstile's new album Never Enough. I've just been feeling very thankful lately for the weird, cool, financially precarious career path I'm lucky enough to pursue. I'm feeling pretty content with life right now. Anyways, enough sappy bullshit. Enjoy the musical whiplash that is this week's Chasing Fridays below.

Find My Friends - find my friends

Over the last month, Chasing Sundays has been on the ground covering all manner of Feeble Little Horse-related happenings, and it's a beat that won't let up. Last week, Feeble Little Horse's principle songwriter Sebastian Kinsler released a self-titled solo record under the moniker Find My Friends. If you're fond of how Feeble Little Horse draw a bridge between wilted slowcore plods and carbonated shoegaze swells, then you'll probably like a few songs on Find My Friends.

However, what I like most about this album is how it reupholsters FLH's quirky indie-rock foundation with laptop trickery: computerized vocal chirps, sampledelic guitar loops, and breakbeats that scuffle and crunch like forest debris rustling in the breeze. I'd drop it in the same folder as the A Country Western side project Solvent OS and the TAGABOW subsidiary god of war, though more concise than the former and less jolting than the latter. As a vocalist and lyricist, Kinsler doesn't have the magnetic personality of his FLH co-singer Lydia Slocum, but he has enough quirky ideas to make find my friends an entertaining 16 minutes of what Rate Your Music would call "indietronica." I'd call it...good.

Lil Fitted Cap, smokedope2016 - Slow Down

Lil Fitted Cap is a producer who's only ever made beats for smokedope2016, and smokedope2016 is the only rapper on Slow Down, so I'm not really sure why this isn't being billed as a smokedope2016 mixtape. Regardless, this is functionally the follow-up to smokedope2016's January mixtape The Peak, which I scratched my head at back in March and haven't been able to shake out of my rotation ever since. It's one of my most-played projects of 2025 even though I really only love two songs on it, so by that logic, I like Slow Down two-to-three times more. And no, that isn't just because I was jumpscared by an Alex G bar in the hook of "Treehouse."

Everyone I talk to about smokedope2016 compares him to Lil Peep, and then I reply by saying, "yes, but not quite." There's a frat-boy sleaziness in smokedope2016's rapping that differs from Lil Peep's wounded sensitivity. Lil Peep is Hot Topic music – smokedope2016 is Zumiez music. Skatewear for popular kids; rap music for the guys at the party who look douchey but are actually pretty shy and just want to smoke in the back room all night. Moreover, Lil Peep rapped like he had something to say. A genuine pathos in his delivery that made him such a tragically magnetic figure. smokedope2016 is, by virtue of being a masked rapper with an impersonal public presence, far more anonymous. In a weird way, I think that actually works to his advantage. You can glean whatever you wish – narcotic fantasies, early SoundCloud nostalgia, pangs of hopelessness – from his head-empty vibes songs. Slow Down is as art-house savvy or as smoke-shop stupid as you want it to be.

In his Masked Gorilla interview, smokedope2016 claimed that he was once tripping on acid for eight months straight, and his music sounds like a reflection of that permafried state. He's not doing anything all that weird or avant-garde, but there's an uncanny psychedelia to the way his grainy annunciations brush against the bleary beats, all of which are muddy and damp like week-old bongwater. On Slow Down, he raps about blacking out on Four Lokos, playing PSP games, and begging his girl to stay in for the night to get high. He makes the mundanity of being an aimless dirtbag sound cool. His obsession with the decade encompassing 2006-2016 is so consistent that I actually find the pastiche charming. He really just sounds like a guy who enjoys collecting Element zip-ups and hotboxing his bedroom while old Schoolboy Q bumps out of his Bluetooth speakers.

Vibe conjurers are a dime a dozen in underground rap these days. What makes smokedope2016 more than just a novelty act with one of the most embarrassing names to say aloud are the durable melodies that leak effortlessly out of his mouth like penjamin puffs. Lil Fitted Cap deserves credit as well. I wouldn't call his production innovative by any stretch of the imagination, but he's good at cherry picking primitive shards from cloud-rap, witch-house, and emo-rap and condensing them into digestible pop structures that his go-to MC sinks into like a well-worn mancave couch. On Slow Down, the duo's chemistry is more locked-in and inspired than ever. If you've been skeptical that a white rapper named smokedope2016 is worth your time, I sympathize with your hesitancy and also implore you to throw this project on. Like the scent of Twisted Tea on a tattered La-Z-Boy, it may never leave your playlists.

Ritual Cross - Ritual Cross

Ritual Cross, by Ritual Cross

5 track album

Ritual CrossBandcamp New & Notable Jul 14, 2024

Ritual Cross are a new Chicago hardcore band that feature friend of the blog and fellow music critic David Anthony on guitar (subscribe to Formal Clarity). This is very much a "check out my buddy's band" blurb rather than a True-Blue Music Journalism writeup, but I'll still keep it real with ya'll. Ritual Cross play noisy, gnarled hardcore that calls back to Neurosis before they were a metal band. It's heavy and cacophonous without cosplaying as metal, urgent and ugly but more sophisticated than straight-ahead 80s punk. It's not a style of hardcore that I'm prone to throwing on outside of an academic listening exercise, or if I happen to see a band like this play with another hardcore band that cater to my mosh-friendly proclivities.

However, even though this isn't conventionally My Thing, this EP fucking rips. The vocals are unhinged and the guitar tones are just the right amount of jagged where they still retain their unseemly shape. The temper is rageful and the tempos are turgid, but there's also an undertone of filmy post-punk (especially in "All Shutters Shattered") that winks to The Wipers or Mission of Burma without hindering the haggard vibes. The song "Flower World" is my favorite track because its stompy intro makes me want to pile-drive a bunch of battlejacket punks gripping beers into the venue wall. The slow lurch returns in the song's nail-scraping back-end and it sounds like the punks getting revenge by pouring beer in my hair and smearing scabies into my Comfort Colors t-shirt. I like how Ritual Cross make me feel a little bit out of my element. I like how Ritual Cross make me reconsider what my element even is in the first place.

First Day Back - Forward

Taste the Steel @ Preserving Underground

This was an awesome lineup, as the above flier makes clear. Seeing Speed in a tiny room was a treat, and catching Bangkok's Whispers on their first U.S. trek was special. But I can't stop thinking about Taste the Steel. The Erie hardcore band have been around since the early 2000s and are one of those bands who are to PAHC what a band like The Killer are to Chicago hardcore. If you know then you know – and by "know" I mean that you've either thrown or caught a fist at one of their shows. It's hard to put the exact vibe into words, but there's a deep reverence in Pittsburgh for the state's elder metallic hardcore bands. Steel Nation, Vow of Hatred, No Reason to Live, and xRepresentx are all Western PA bands who've been intermittently active for well over a decade, and whenever I've seen them play Pittsburgh, the unspoken etiquette is that if you don't mosh then you're essentially spitting on their feet.

I've participated in other genres of music where older acts are revered, but not in the same way Pittsburgh's young hardcore fans adore the local acts from generations past. Taste the Steel have released three demos and a handful of singles since 2005. Their members are in their early 40s. They're by all accounts a marginal band in the worldwide context of hardcore. There're plenty of great, older hardcore bands who've been forgotten to the sands of time. Whose shows are busts that basically function as an excuse for old friends to get together and drink. That's not the case with bands like Taste the Steel. Young kids and old heads alike were there for the music and the moshpit. They were there to participate in the preservation of a Pennsylvania subculture. To communicate the verbal and physical history of a sound, a style, a somatic tradition that most people don't understand, but for those who do, that experience is ecstatic, spiritual, diabolically fun.

2006 Demo, by TASTE THE STEEL

6 track album

TASTE THE STEELBandcamp Album of the Day May 22, 2025

One of the biggest hardcore bands in the world right now were headlining this show, but Taste the Steel got the best reaction. I've seen a lot of violent shows during my time in Pittsburgh. If you stand next to as many pits as I have, then you eventually get desensitized to the combat and it takes an acute jolt of extremity to give your amygdala the trigger it needs to fulfill your thrill-seeking desires. Taste the Steel's pit made my amygdala ring like a prison siren. The edges of the pit were stretched and snapped like a rubber band breaking. Big, big men were hurling their bodies like it was some kind of Purge scenario where bones are incapable of cracking for this one 30-minute period. It was hellaciously feral in all the ways great beatdown shows are, but what really impressed me about Taste the Steel is that they had something to say between songs. About war, capitalism, and the need for neighbors – no matter their sex, gender, race, or creed – to stick together. It's cliché, but to me, that's what hardcore is about. Community, catharsis, crowdkilling. It's not for everyone, but being in a room of 200 people who get it is so, so special. ​

Chasing Down

FearDorian

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

I can't think of too many current artists with a resume as versatile as FearDorian's. A sample-savvy producer who's crafted beats for Kenny Mason, quinn, and RiTchie, among countless others. A rapper who can pull off subdued introspection (this year's poignant, pretty Leaving Home) and vibrant humor (last year's wickedly thrilling A Dog's Chance collab with Polo Perks and Ayoolii) with equal finesse. An artist who, in 2025 alone, has toured with screamo innovators Your Arms Are My Cocoon and post-punk explorers Squid. No one's defying border genres quite like FearDorian; a Roc Nation signee who I saw rap over a TAGABOW sample onstage last month.

Needless to say, I was excited to pick FearDorian's brain about their eclectic taste for this week's edition of Chasing Down. I asked about their favorite screamo bands, their proudest sample flip, their pick for the funniest rapper in the underground – and then I got a little preview of their next solo album. Read the full Q&A below.

What's the last SoundCloud-exclusive song/album/tape you heard that made you say, “fuck….that's tuff”? 

“WHILE ON CALL” by hernbean5150. Crazy chops and sample flips on here.