At the top of year LA trio Your Grandparents announced their new album, their first on the ‘art-driven, development-driven’ imprint drink sum wtr. ‘The Dial’ is a breath of fresh air; a cool calming inhale and a warm unwinding exhale. This album – vocals by DaCosta (Kyle) and Jean Carter (Chaz), and production by Cole Thompson – represents Your Grandparents’ reintroduction to music. Their journey started at middle school Culver City, their synergy inspired by a mutual love and nostalgic bone for the music they grew up hearing. From releasing early experiments on SoundCloud, solidifying their early promise on 2019 debut ‘Been Cold’, they became a variegated collective of quick-witted rappers who dabbled in jazzy vocal stylings and picturesque artistic direction.
“I think time is a circle, infinitely repeating itself,” Thompson says. “There’s a bunch of smaller circles within the larger one. Everything we experience is cyclical in the micro and macro.” These ideas created the foundation for what became ‘The Dial’. The opener was the first song the group completed for this project, and so it made sense the album would be named after it. Jean Carter sings, “When the sun sets and I look at the dial, I wanna surely say I wasted no time,” inviting the listener to take a moment and luxuriate in the present. “We wanted to relay that message that things will work out when they’re supposed to,” DaCosta affirms.
‘All Dem Times’ builds outward from the intro, traversing the relationship between stillness, time, and expectations but its ‘White Flags’, the pensive final track, that is a perfect summation of the emotional through-line that underscores the album. If each track illustrates a time of day, ‘White Flags’ is the sun at its brightest, just before it starts to descend; a bright, golden hour quality that’s illuminating though subtle. The cyclical nature of the album is its core strength, ending with lessons learned, and beginning again with hopeful acceptance of the present moment.
On ‘The Dial’ the group’s evolution goes far beyond musicality. They have refined their pen on a taut, no-filler album. A radiant mosaic of calm meditation and emotional release, crafted with a level of expertise and wisdom that invokes their namesake. In the run-up to the album release, CLASH sat down with Your Grandparents to talk group synergy and why ‘The Dial’ is the culmination of a decade of building blocks.
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I used to play ‘Sunlight’ from ‘Thru My Window’ into the ground. How would you say your sound and musicianship has evolved from then until now?
Jean Carter: We used to be really rap heavy. I think we definitely leaned into a lot more R&B, soul, jazz and fusion. Over the past few years, we had a couple projects out on SoundCloud when we were in high school, but the first official iTunes release that we put out was that ‘My Only One’ track, with Umi. It was a pretty gradual evolution, and I think where we’re at now is a good balance of everywhere we’ve been and a couple places we haven’t.
DaCosta: Going back to what Chaz was saying, we were really rap heavy before. After a while, at least from our perspective, it started to feel like only rapping wasn’t enough for us to convey the message or the emotion behind the song. We had to expand as musicians to really express more of what we were feeling and hearing in our heads.
Jean Carter: Yeah. I also feel like the world was in a place where rap, like real rap, the way we were doing it, wasn’t being perceived the way we intended.
Did you feel you had outgrown that phase mentally?
DaCosta: There definitely were some mental shifts while making this project, just in terms of being intentional with my approach on how I would write my verses. I was really inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DAMN’. I went back and listened to it and was thinking to myself just how insane and incredible a writer he is. I wondered how often he would go back and refine those songs. It’s one of the few albums I’ve ever listened that has zero skips on it. For anybody, whether I like your music or not, that’s just a really tough thing to do. So something that I wanted to practice for this project was just going back and refining, re-recording, re-writing verses for songs, until I felt that I had something that perfectly fit the puzzle pieces of everything that’s going on with the production and how Chaz is singing and coming at the hooks. I really wanted to play my role as a supporting member and compliment the track as best as I could.
Cole: To piggyback off that too, I feel like I spend a lot of time with my engineering hat on because we do most stuff from the home studio, or just somewhere that’s very close to home for us. We spent a lot of time focused on trying to find what compliments it. You know, there’s no ego at all, just us thinking how could this be better? Is this what the song needs? Especially with ‘White Flags’, we were like maybe we don’t need to re-record, maybe we just leave it as Jean’s raw demo take. All of the vocals, except for some minor repairs, were the original things that he recorded. I think for me that was a mindset shift. Intention doesn’t mean you have to keep going until it’s perfect. If it fits, it fits. And that’s what’s intentional about it; you find the thing that fits regardless of whether it’s the first thing or the last thing you try.
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Were you reading, watching, or consuming anything that you returned to while you were making the album?
Cole: For me, a big through-line for this album was that I was consuming a lot of things, especially for the production side of things. One of those things is, outside of the group, I work with people that host an intentional listening session called the Record Club. A lot of that is sitting down, listening to music during these monthly sessions where the host is diving deeply into like ‘Voodoo’ by D’Angelo and ‘Aquemini’ by Outkast. There’s a lot of seminal albums for different artists. And so I think that informed a lot of my musical taste as we were progressing through the album; being able to get an inside view of the music made me reflect back on the process. That shifted my mindset on how I approached the more technical side of technical things.
I wanted to ask each of you which was your favourite song to create?
DaCosta: For me, I’d have to say ‘Tea Lounge/Blossom’. I think that’s my favourite to listen to, and was my favorite to write. Just cause it ended up being a two-part song; there were two separate songs at first, and then we ended up kind of joining them together. I’m experimenting more with singing a little bit with this sort of flowy, soft feeling that you had mentioned you liked about this album. The first verse I think is probably one of my best on the project.
Jean: I really like ‘White Flags’.
Cole: I think for me it’s ‘All Dem Times’. I revisited it thinking about where I was when we started it versus where I’m at now. That one just doesn’t seem to get old for me. Speaking of ‘Tea Lounge’, I’ve actually DJed this song at this little wine bar. And I think one of the songs I played after it was ‘Safe And Warm’ by Brick. I feel like the middle half of ‘Tea Lounge’, where the drums switch, was very much Dilla-inspired. I’m a Dilla head. Every time I hear Kyle rap, I’m like, I love this pocket and I need to accentuate it, you know?
What are you most excited about when the album comes out?
Jean: It’s a re-introduction of us, and the beginning of us dropping music more consistently and kind of just getting back to it.
Cole: I agree with that. I feel like there was a little bit of a hiatus. So, there’s kind of a momentum you have coming back. It’s cool to see who is tuning in, seeing some of the same names that I’ve seen from years past commenting on things, or in our DMs. That’s been really exciting. This project is a couple years in the making. Like Chaz was saying, it’s really a reintroduction ushering us into that new era. For me creatively, I feel as each single comes out, more and more fresh energy floods into my space and my mind. There’s still space to kind of explore what’s new.
DaCosta: I think I’m excited for what potential collaborative opportunities come from this. Especially living in LA, we’re surrounded by so many musicians, rappers and singers and just people who I would consider our peers that I think we’d make great music with. It’s been a while since we put out music, and I think this album will be a good segue into future collaborations. We’re showing people this is what our sound is like now and this is how we’ve evolved.
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‘The Dial’ is out tomorrow.
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Words: ea. osei
Photo Credit: Richard Brooks
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