EarthGang wants to tell Atlanta's story

The inspiration behind EarthGang's forthcoming album, Strays with Rabies, isn't as aggressive as the title might suggest. The follow-up to the alt-rap Atlanta duo's 2013 effort, Shallow Graves for Toys is a nod to the nomadic nature of its creators, Doctor Dot and Johnny Venus. "We just move around and make music along the way," Doctor Dot says. "That's the lifestyle. Hopefully people get more in tune with it. It's about freedom and truth, man."

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And therein lies the gift and curse that has followed EarthGang since the duo's maiden release (2010's The Better Party EP), and subsequent full-lengths (2011's Mad Men and Good News) before ...Toys. The two MC's met as high schoolers in Atlanta, and have been running and collaborating in the same circles as the Two-9s of the world (Curtis Williams' brother provided them with a studio space once). They launched their career as EarthGang outside of the city limits, when Doctor Dot and Johnny Venus were students at Hampton University in Virginia. Those early releases received moderate buzz amongst friends, family, and the group's local contemporaries, but for the most part, the two lyricists with Southern boy charms, slang, and thrift store fashion sense didn't immediately grab the industry's collective attention. Even with incorporating the rawest elements of New York's boom bap aughts, there was no real love at home or stateside for the two kids who left the city in 2008, only to return on a more or less permanent basis a year and a half ago. "Part of it was we weren't here, we weren't present," Doctor Dot says. "For our first couple projects, most of the love was from other countries because we were just putting them out on the Internet for anyone who would listen to us. It was dorm room music."

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The lo-fi, undergrad production tale took a grown-man turn with Shallow Graves for Toys. The 14-track release, though not a game-changer, was enough to finally awake sleeping fans, critics, and other artists. "It felt like a renewal for Atlanta," NOISEY writer Kyle Kramer wrote in a review, calling the project, "a departure from the city's familiar club sounds, an invocation of another local duo who were almost too inventive for their own good — OutKast."

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Though they don't mind the comparisons to Big Boi and Andre 3000, the group calls Shallow Graves for Toys a musical gut-punch to those not well-versed in the EarthGang backstory, or their collective, Spillage Village. Though it was led by the standout, in-your-face ode to not giving a fuck, "The F Bomb," it was other cuts including the laid-back, jazzy, "Bill Campbell's Soup," the brass-backed "16 Albinos in the S.W.A.T.S," and the kinetic crunk of "Machete," that moved EarthGang from the periphery to the forefront. It was also the first release they spent time recording in Atlanta. They've since toured with Ab-Soul, and are headed out on the road with Mac Miller this winter. There's also talk of joining Big K.R.I.T. for a few dates, though nothing has been set in stone. "The fan base is growing fast as shit right now," Doctor Dot says. "I don't even know why, but I don't care."

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If Shallow Graves for Toys was the straight-shot, arrow-to-bull's-eye re-introduction, Strays with Rabies promises to be a bit less deliberate. The idea is that listeners should be "sitting in a room and watching, with a skylight, the shit around you," the group says.

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Now that they're calling home home again, EarthGang is feeling a need to dispel preconceived notions of Atlanta music and culture they were met with by journalists and other artists on the road over the past year. "They treat Atlanta like the zoo or the circus, something where it's just one thing you want to look at," Doctor Dot says.

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Whether or not Strays with Rabies will help in the group's mission to counter outside ignorance remains to be seen. It's slated for release on EarthGang's own Spillage Village Records in conjunction with Empire Distribution, in mid to late September according to management.

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Album politics aside, Doctor Dot and Johnny Venus feel they have an obligation to their hometown. "That's on us as Atlanta to tell her true story, now," Johnny Venus says. "Artists speak for the city, for the community. Individual people don't tell what murals to do, what festivals to have, that really springs forth from the whole community."