CLBRKS and Conrad Mundy are two exciting prospects coming out of the UK, and their joint project ‘Out For Lunch’ is finally here. The two have been working together since meeting back in 2017, with singles such as ‘First Class’ receiving love from underground Rap communities. Fast forward to 2020 and they are reunited, with years of friendship behind them it’s a long overdue body of work. The 5-track project is produced by DraeDaSkiMask, providing a fuse of nostalgic 90’s boom-bap rap and trap allowing both artists to experiment over a variety of styles of beats.
CLBRKS has been on many peoples radars this year, his most recent project ‘Microwave Cooking 2000’ was released back in March and he has not slowed down since. Conrad also featured on the project providing us with an epic verse on ‘Cement’ giving us an example of what to expect. I was fortunate enough to interview them both of them to discuss ‘Out For Lunch’ and more.
Jimi: Easy Lads, I hope all is good. Congratulations on the release guys, firstly what inspired the project name?
CLBRKS: Thank you. The project title is inspired by a phrase that Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead) had written on his bass guitar; “born to lose, out to lunch”. The phrase sort of resonated with us, we both like to go out to eat, get around, etc. We just liked something about it. The project and its title are kind of inspired by that era of Rock & Roll, the sort of glamour and excess that you don’t usually find in popular music these days. We tried to incorporate that kind of style into the artwork by Junior Adesanya; he typically creates black and white graphics that are a bit zine like, punk kind of shit. Drae also carries that raw, D.I.Y aesthetic both in his beats and work ethos. It all kind of blends.
J: This isn’t the first time you have both worked together, tell us how the two of you originally linked up?
Conrad Mundy: When I moved to London a few years ago we hit each other up on IG, we got along straight away and had bare shit in common. The fact we both have the same name and make music was a bonus too.
CLBRKS: It was in 2017 at Kiina’s house, I was working on ‘Habits’ at the time I think, or maybe had just released it. Over that time it’s taken us three years to pull together five songs we feel really confident about in project form. Our friendship, knowledge and following has developed, and that has given us the time to revisit and reconsider aspects of the project that we may have initially ignored.
J: Fast forward to now, how did it feel getting back into it and what was the workflow like for this project in particular?
CL: Very spaced out, we released two odd singles collectively in those three years (First Class, Lethal Weapon 2), but just kept the project on ice for a long time. We had to edit music videos together ourselves using footage downloaded from YouTube as a means of working around lockdown restrictions. When we next meet we’ll begin working on the next thing.