On the Rise
Tebi Rex

“Right now, we're real high-energy, real fun,” Max Zanga states. “The best hip-hop performance in Ireland. We'd die by that, we stand by that.”

One half of Tebi Rex, the 22-year-old provides the rap verses while Matt O’Baoil, 25, delivers on smooth vocals. Together, they create genre-spanning beats that are ultimately derived from hip-hop, inspired by their lives and experiences of Ireland's burgeoning music movement.

The two are sitting on Matt’s “corporate” L-shaped sofa in Dublin while they’re chatting, and bounce off one another, making jokes and radiating the energy of old friends. Their first encounter, however, was somewhat combative: they met in 2014 while at college in Kildare, battling it out in a talent competition. “We always tell this story. Max likes telling it because one of us won and one of us lost,” Matt says. “Technically I cheated because I played a medley of, like, six songs and he played one.”

“… and the rule was you do one,” Max chimes in. “So obviously white privilege prevailed and he won.” Matt continues: “I could only do one performance so I thought I'd steal the show.” Nevertheless, they formed an unlikely friendship after Max posted a Facebook status asking for people to collaborate with him on a music project. He remembers, “I was a bit sceptical, because he had just become the student union president. So I was like, ‘ah he might be a bit of square or too serious’. We met up and I heard him sing, and no one sounds like this guy.”

Tebi Rex blend elements of dance music with smooth hip-hop and lyrical precision. Should you go scrolling through their recent back-catalogue you'll find a collection of tracks that glide through genres, ranging from the bouncy, dubstep-lite pop of “Financial Controller” to the heavier and more experimental alt rap of “No. 1 Symbol of Peace”. Max explains his eclectic taste and how this inspired Tebi Rex’s sound. “I really did fuck a lot with Odd Future, Kanye West and Gambino; their intimacy, the closeness, and rawness,” he says. “In tone and delivery, I would say Kate Nash is one of my biggest influences. Kate Nash sounds like Kate Nash. Just to have such a distinct voice in how to deliver your music is so dope, and so few people have that.”

For Matt, his influences vary but centre mainly around poetic lyricism. “What shaped my writing was Chance the Rapper's early mixtapes, like 10 Day and Acid Rap, the poetry that he entwined into those and his lyrics, jokes and the personality in how he shapes his verses,” he says, explaining how this approach is something he’s ingrained into his own work. “As I mature, I understand that not everything I do is perfect, it's not always great. A lot of the stuff I do needs commented on, looked at and reviewed.”

In terms of writing, Matt focuses more on self-reflection, while it seems that Max's influences come from what’s going on around him. “Living in Kildare, there's very few Black people and being from a small village, my earlier music was very much about feeling disconnected from the rest of culture,” he reflects. “Especially being in Ireland, and really loving hip-hop from the mid 2000s… that wasn't a popular thing here. There weren’t shows to go to, artists were skipping this destination so it was almost like you were doing music for nobody.”

“If you're an Irish musician – regardless of what you're writing about – you can't disconnect hip-hop music from the fact that you're in Ireland because that shaped it. That shapes what kind of money you're getting and what kind of shows you can do.”

Nevertheless, Tebi Rex persevere by just creating music ‘that we like to listen to’, as Max explains. “We started blending elements of indie rock, pop, electro and dance. For us it's not so much what our style is, but the vibe of that song and what we want to communicate. If we need to create a techno record to capture a feeling, we will learn how to make a techno record. I don't how we'd fucking start but we'd figure it out.”

The duo live separately in Dublin and Kildare, so most communication is done through emails, voice memos and social media. Max says, “We don't tell the other what to write. I'll be like, ‘hey, write about how it felt when… or capture the feeling of being a kid in the summer.’ I won't say ‘place it here, use this framing, use this concept’, it's always like, ‘this is how I was feeling when I thought about this song, try to replicate those feelings for yourself.’ A lot of times, that means we both have a song and a theme but we take very different approaches.”

One example of this method can be found within the song “Men Are Trash” – a catchy pop tune that sounds playful at first, but upon closer inspection calls out men for their bad behaviour. Within this, Matt and Max embody outlandish versions of themselves, with lines like, “Girlies say ‘I love him’ / And I be like ‘I love you’ / Until I give the D then / Then I be like ‘Who you?’” Max explains that this song started out as an apology to a friend. “I was like, 'let's write a song about how we can be shitty at times and can't accept our faults.' So, I wrote in the way of a fuckboy being like, ‘here's all these bad things but I don't recognise that they're bad’, because that would be an exaggerated version of how I can be.”

“He [Matt] wrote it in the way of a soft boy where it's like, 'here's all these bad things but since I'm telling you all these bad things upfront you can't get mad at me for doing them,’” he adds. “We were both different versions of the shitty men, but because they're based off who we are, they're opposite approaches to songwriting which I thought was really interesting.”

Tebi Rex have expanded the idea of a concept piece to their upcoming album, The Young Will Eat the Old, which centres around fame – touching on the heady rise, crippling egotism and eventual crushing low. Inspired by Greek mythology and the growing interest in Ireland’s music scene, the duo closely examine the potential for their own bleak future should they misstep in these early years of recognition. “[The downfall can happen] over time and you become less popular or you can't sustain the thing you captured when you were younger... or just a year ago,” Max reflects. “It's a fickle thing and we wanted to portray that. There's the anxiety of losing what you've built, and the anxiety of keeping it.”

Their own experiences of teetering on the edge of fame helped to inspire this, Matt outlines. “We're very much on a certain path in terms of our music career. We're starting up, we're hyping up, we're getting crowds in, streams up and we're slowly building up steam and pace to the point where we get recognised,” he says. “We might get stopped [in the street] and it's like, how much does that escalate to the point where it gets dangerous for your ego? You have to keep an eye on yourself because someone may take you down eventually.”

Max adds, “It being a concept album, we take these characters that are exaggerated versions of ourselves,” he says. “It falls in three acts so there are versions of ourselves that are much further along in their careers and lives. Essentially, it's a hesitant prophecy because we don't want it to happen.”

Max – who Matt points out as ‘the artsy one’ – also took inspiration from historical references of Romantic paintings and legends of ancient deities, which interweave perfectly into the narrative. “I got the idea from the painting Saturn Devouring His Son [by Francisco Goya], and a lot of the album is inspired by Greek myth,” he says. “It's the story of constant cycles almost always repeating themselves, as people who are the next one up think they'll be better than the ones who come before them. A lot of the time they fall privy to the same mistakes and shortcomings. That's something portrayed so well in Greek mythology and literature that we thought it would be cool to do.”

With a whole new collection of songs to showcase, and such a diverse archive to choose from, Tebi Rex are incredibly enthusiastic to take on a growing live audience. Matt gives a snippet of what to expect from their shows. “They’re very high-energy, I'm almost like a screamo act for the whole live set. I would challenge any Irish act to put on a better show than us.” he says. “We're the best live Irish hip-hop act, I say that on God I swear!’” Max exclaims. Matt quips back, “This is the God complex coming through.”

Time begins to catch up. Between the playful banter, and the palpable sense of excitement the duo exude when talking about upcoming releases and performances, it feels necessary to ask who they dream of collaborating with. The answer – perhaps expected from a band who seem to have set their focus on carving out a distinguishable sound – Max pleads, “Kate Nash. If you're listening please, please, please.”