INTRODUCING: Oxymorrons

OXYMORRONS are named after the word oxymoron, which is defined as ‘a figure of speech in which apparently contractionary words are used together’. It’s a good name for a band who mix hip-hop and rock together; two genres that shouldn’t work on paper, but do in their music.

The cover for their debut album, Melanin Punk, almost had a different cover. “We wanted to create a cover that showed our character, Mel, the punk rocker that you see on our album covers since our EP, Enemy, going into a museum room that’s full of the album covers of the artists that inspired us,” Dave ‘Deee’ Bellevue, vocalist for OXYMORRONS, explains. Unfortunately, when they turned the original idea – which was designed by Ed Rosas – in, their record label said that they couldn’t use it because they couldn’t get all the rights to use the covers of other artists.

“Our quick fix for that was to just put question marks there,” Dave explains. Sonically, the album has inspirations from “BRING ME THE HORIZON, TYLER THE CREATOR, lots of old punk bands. It’s the soundtrack to our culture. The diversity within the band is what inspired and impacted the album the most.” The result is an album that covers a variety of genres, including hip-hop and guitar driven music. However, most importantly, it shines a light on a lot of topics that don’t get talked about a lot.

“We touch upon alcoholism, but also other topics, such as being more accepting of people of different sexual orientations and in general, aggression, female drug deals, which is what Re-Up is about. We normally get the male perspective, but we wanted to give the female perspective. But we mostly wanted to tap in to topics that are seen as taboo in society,” Dave says. 

He goes on to explain about the album title. “Melanin Punk is not about punk the genre, but punk the ethos. It’s the rebellious nature. As for melanin, it’s in every single person alive, so it’s about bringing people together. The concept of the album is bringing our perspective of black guitar driven music, and therefore, it’s a broad one because there’s four of us in the band. It might not feel like a concept album, but it definitely is.”

The album also contains a lot of collaborations. There were so many collaborations that some fell through and didn’t make it onto the album. However, the ones that did make it onto the record were KID BOOKIE on Head For The Hills, Troi Irons on Last Call, Hyro The Hero on Mike Shinoda Flow, and KANNER on Re-Up.

“Collaborating is when we’re really inspired by an artist, and we really like their talent and what they’re doing, so we just say ‘hey’ to the artist. One of our favourite collaborations that we did was with Troi Irons. Last Call was a song with a lot of depth and meaning to it because it touches on alcoholism, and when we wrote the song, we knew we have to get Troi on this because they would crush it,” Dave laughs, “and we sent it to them, and not only do they sing on it, but they added layers and textures and played a guitar on it. It was just awesome. And that’s how we’ve gone about all our collaborations.

“We also wanted to highlight other artists people of colour in rock music, but to also have different sexual orientations and to just offer something different and it was really cool to have that on our first album.”

The album itself is full of amazing songs. However, the closing song, Moon Chasers, is one of the highlights. “We chose to end the album with Moon Chasers because it’s very uplifting. It feels like a culmination of all the bad and all the good. I’m hoping the vibe it gives off is that it’s always positive and that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what you’re going through,” Dave says.

However, there is also a fun side to OXYMORRONS which is best exemplified in the song Mike Shinoda Flow. Dave says that the song always gets brought up in interviews, which surprises him as it’s the most hip-hop leaning song on the album. He explains how the song – which was written before the band even decided to release an album – came about.

“We wanted to put a song on there that showcased lyrical ability in a hip-hop way. In rock music in general, the capability of rapping is seen as easier as singing or screaming. In actual fact, especially the way we do it, it isn’t. There’s a complexity to it with the musical techniques: writing within sixteen-bar melodies, and then having those sixteen bar melodies come in and out of each other. The raps have double and triple entendres. We wanted to be able to showcase that. Secondly, we love LINKIN PARK, and we happened to write the song on Mike Shinoda‘s birthday. We didn’t even know,” he laughs. “We were scrolling through Instagram and we saw it was his birthday. We had to keep the name!”

Their love of listening to all kinds of music growing up influenced their decision to not box OXYMORRONS in to any genre. “We believe music should be genre-less because it’s all frequency. It just so happened that rock and hip-hip spoke to us the most. It’s all just one big melting pot.”

With their debut album earning rave reviews from fans and critics alike, it seems that OXYMORRONS‘ melting pot is just going to get bigger as they grow in popularity. This is just the start of a very exciting chapter.

Melanin Punk is out now via Mascot Records.

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