Oakland’s Very Own: Ovrkast.A producer first, the 27-year-old has landed early-career credits with Earl Sweatshirt and Drake; as he seeks to establish himself as a just-as-reputable rapper, he’s outgrown the confines of both his hometown and the underground, but is bringing the East Oakland energy over to the East Coast.
Even 14 hours after the release of While The Iron Is Hot, Ovrkast. is still infectiously chill. To commemorate the drop of his sophomore studio project, the rapper hosted a listening party and panel at the Carhartt WIP store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the night prior. Free and open to the public, the event still felt intimate, like a bunch of old friends catching up over draft beers, half-baked anecdotes, and an on-site screen-printing station pumping out a fresh batch of one-night-only Ovrkast. x Carhartt WIP tees stamped with the slogan “Ready to Strike.”
“I gotta stay back here or else I’ll get in my head,” the rapper tells me from behind one of the dressing room curtains just 30 minutes before the event was set to start. Attendees don’t even know Kast is here and don’t seem pressed, flitting around the open-concept streetwear space to peep the store’s new skate decks and graphics. The energy in the room emulated Kast’s effortless essence, and once he felt centered, he stepped out into it.
The past year has been all about finding his footing. The Oakland rapper often finds himself just seven minutes down the block at Marsha P. Johnson State Park. The waterside Williamsburg green space, one of his favorite spots in his new-ish home of New York City, is where I met him for our formal conversation and shoot. The now-Ridgewood resident has been coming here frequently since his cross-country move just over a year ago, and says it’s the place that feels most like his NorCal home. If it looks familiar, he also shot his “FREE UP SUMN” video just around the corner at the top of this year.
Despite being just shy of 3,000 miles east of his hometown, Oakland’s all over Kast, from his style and his slang, down to his no-sweat swagger.
“Oakland is just so authentic. Everyone there is so down-to-earth. It’s just ingrained in us,” the rapper muses, reminiscing on growing up surrounded by a myriad of cultures, styles of art, and genres of music, ranging from hard hip-hop to Hyphy. “The Bay Area is hip-hop as fuck. Music has been in me forever.”
While California was crucial to his come-up, the 26-year-old revels fondly in the day he left his East Oakland abode. Ultimately, it was his father who catalyzed the rapper’s move, recognizing he’d outgrown the confines of Alameda County both artistically and personally.
“I needed someone to tell me to leave, and my dad knew there was more for me than just Oakland,” reflects Kast, who firmly believes that no matter where you live, you have to move somewhere else.
“Coming to New York City was me mobilizing all that I’d learned in Oakland and putting those skills to use,” he continues, expressing that even this first year of finding his East Coast footing has allowed him to grow and “rediscover” himself in ways that felt unfeasible out West. He visits home often, though, saying whenever he does venture back, it “feels like a hug” — and even East Oakland rappers need hugs.
Back in the Bay, he’s somewhat still just Silas Wilson, the kid in charge of running the lyric slides at church. “I learned music structurally,” he explains, almost realizing it in the moment. “I started being able to intrinsically pick up on when something in the song would change — when the verse would change into the chorus, when the chorus would turn to the hook.”
Hitting ‘next’ on the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” turned to thumbing through websites like DatPiff, Napster, and LimeWire, fully immersing himself in the digital music discovery process and building an archive of his personal taste from the comfort of his couch. Punk rock was the artist’s first love, playlisting Green Day, Plain White T’s, and The All-American Rejects — and he’s still able to go bar-for-bar on “Gives You Hell,” as we do for a cathartic 30 seconds.
When he was 15, he came across the vast expanse of hip-hop, finding himself in the genre, specifically in the dynamics of fellow Californian collective Odd Future. “Raunchy ass people doing exactly what I like? Why wouldn’t I fuck with it?”
As he continued to find his likes and dislikes in the music scene, the rapper similarly gravitated toward other “tone-setting pioneers” like Madlib, MF DOOM, J Dilla, Chance the Rapper, and Joey Bada$$. It was one Bada$$ track in particular that Kast recalls prompted his interest in production: the 1999 cut “Killuminati” with Capital Steez.
“I never looked up producers, but that beat was so hard I needed to find out who made it, and that’s how I found Knxwledge and his whole discography,” he says. “I had no money, so I pirated a bunch of his tapes and became obsessed. Sorry, Knxwledge.”
Standing ten toes down on his taste, Kast made his first beat when he was 17, after learning the technical skills from Mr. Holliday, one of his teachers at West Oakland’s Ralph J. Bunche High School. “One day he saw me in the hallway — I have no idea how he knew — and was like ‘Yo, you know how to make beats? And I was like, ‘No,’ and he was like, ‘You want to? Come to the lunchroom.’”
Every day at lunch, Mr. Holliday walked Kast through the basics — how to create a drum loop, how to chop a sample from his extensive sample library, and so on. Lunch sessions evolved into after-school sessions, which in turn became stay-until-security-kicked-him-out sessions, all culminating in thousands of hours that Kast recollects fervently. “He would just listen to me make trash ass beats for hours on end every day and play them on the loudspeakers,” he laughs, still to this day claiming it was Holliday, who laid the groundwork for his launchpad. “Having that was so special, man.”
The mentor-mentee relationship lasted throughout Kast’s high school years, gearing him up for his first official swerve into the sonic space in 2015. He teamed up with his classmates and close friends demahjiae and Kayvon to create Kinfolk, a rap group Kast describes as “a brotherhood of guys who made songs that were not good.” Kast handled most of the trio’s production before passing around a not fully developed beat to the other boys so they could each drop a verse.
Not only did Kinfolk usher in the start of Kast’s music career, but, in his eyes, it marked his first-ever experience creatively collaborating with others — a skill he believes to be “the most important” in music. “You gotta know how to work with other people or else you’re fucked,” says Kast, who, at the time, was unknowingly about to meet one of the most prevalent music collaborators of his career.
Sharing many mutual friends, Ovrkast. met North Carolina native MAVI for the first time later that same year, MAVI similarly just starting out. The first beat Ovrkast. sold was the first beat that MAVI ever bought. Fast forward 10 years, and the duo remains locked in, a handful of studio tracks under their collective belt. Mav pulled up on While The Iron Is Hot’s “MAVKAST!”, a collaborative anthem that pays homage to the pair’s synced come-up.
Also, just a week ahead of the interview, MAVI and Earl Sweatshirt linked back up for their first collaboration since the infamous, Kast-produced, “EL TORO COMBO MEAL” in 2019, which came just under two years after his departure from his LoFiction rap collective. The ten-rapper group devised a West Coast spin on Boom Bap in Oakland, aspiring to the likes of Sweatshirt and his gang and acquiring more collaborative experience before many of them (Kast included) realized they wanted to go solo.
He and Sweatshirt first connected via MAVI just a few months before the materialization of “EL TORO.” What began as “just another beat with some weak ass drums,” quickly evolved into the now-viral track, Kast revising the initial loop just once before sending it to both rappers individually. “MAVI hit me back with his verse and he sent it to Earl also, who was like ‘Wait, I have something to that too,’ so they both sent their verses to me,” and that was the first and final version of the song that’s now racked up over 13 million streams. “Earl really championed me.”
Validated from the song’s success, Kast followed up with his first solo studio project, Try Again — a sonic soundscape of his “uncomfortableness.” “I couldn’t be who I wanted to be, and that was my best attempt at doing it,” he says. With features from old friend demahjie, old-ish friend MAVI, and new friends Pink Siifu and Navy Blue (whom he met through MAVI), the nine-track project is a raw encapsulation of Kast’s struggle. He then wrote an album that he never dropped called CLOSURE, a COVID- created confrontation of all that was weighing on him, on which he “fleshed out of every single difficult thing in life.” To this day, it remains unfinished, but the rapper believes it was meant to stay as such, the project more of a vehicle for his inner monologue instead of for public consumption.
Admittedly, the self-described “lazy perfectionist” never really knows when something is finished, theorizing he could’ve added more to each one of his projects. After Try Again and its deluxe came 2023’s six-track RESET! and 2024’s KASTGOTWINGS collab mixtape with Cardo Got Wings, the projects punctuated by notable Messiah x MAVI x Kast collab “silent heel,” and the two tracks he produced for Drake’s For All The Dogs Scary Hours Edition, “Red Button” and “The Shoe Fits.”
“Drake didn’t pick the beats I thought he was going to pick, but that’s the beauty of it,” he says, stating the key to producing for another artist is letting the artist lead. It’s taken the rapper a while to gain the confidence to play his beats for other artists, keeping it real when he says, “There’s no way to get over the uncomfortableness. You just have to get over the embarrassment of showing somebody something. There’s no how. You just have to do it. You have to embarrass yourself.”
As he does with all of his creative pursuits, the rapper “had [his] thumb on everything” related to While The Iron Is Hot, producing almost everything on the album and even having a hand at video editing. This was a key theme of the listening party panel, on which his Creative Director Kufu sat next to him. Kast explains the pair’s symbiotic synergy, the rapper providing his most honed-in vision yet, and Kufu helping him materialize it.
Kast keeps digital archives and playlists of things that inspire him, but for this album specifically, he kept a Milanote of everything he wanted to accomplish. An organized compilation of videos, to-do lists, quotes, songs, and other media, the project’s inspi- ration board features 1970s Japanese horror film House, Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and documentary-short “Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Mama.”
“I was really on it,” Kast says. “I knew what I wanted to happen […] You don’t need money to make something happen. What you need is a good vision and good people.” In addition to MAVI, While The Iron Is Hot also features Samara Cyn, summer tourmate Saba, and fellow Oaklander Vince Staples, whom he met with Maxo at Camp Flog Gnaw 2024.
While what Kast deems his most focused sonic offering yet continues to do numbers, the rapper finds himself at the most underground he’ll ever be again.
But no matter how many hip-hop heavyweight cosigns he lands, how close he veers into the mainstream, or how many miles he strays from East Oakland, his energy remains the same; it’s what filled the four walls of the Carhartt WIP store, permeated the air at Marsha P. Johnson, and guides every lyric he writes. His energy is his greatest commodity, and he’ll continue to nurture it with visits home, watching Harry Potter with his girlfriend, and walks in the park. Lots of visits home.
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