Brotherhood brings depth to the new collaborative album from TrigNO and Soop

While working on collaborative album Just Due Right, rapper TrigNO and producer/rapper Soop would bookend late night in-studio bursts with escapes to the garage of Soop’s home, where the two would often slip into deep conversation, sharing the ins and outs of past experiences and current day-to-day struggles. These heart-to-hearts, in turn, began to influence the record’s lyrical content, with the two increasingly unpacking accumulated traumas and reflecting on modern horrors, including the death of 25-year-old Black motorist Jayland Walker, who was shot and killed by police in Akron, Ohio, in June 2022, his body riddled with 46 bullets.

“Now I’m at my restaurant, having lunch with the mayor/Discussing steps to hold the police accountable,” the Akron-born Soop raps on “Blood on My Hands,” a few bars later adding, “Cops shot Jayland Walker 60 times/They allowed to.”

“And I’m seeing my people, and I’m getting calls from my cousins, like, ‘Yo, a kid got shot 46 times and they tearing Akron up,’” said Soop, born Demetrius Howard, who joined TrigNO for an early July Zoom interview. “And this was right around the time I sent Trig what I thought was a dope beat. And then that shit hit the headlines and it was like, ‘Bro, I have to talk about it.’ … Something was disturbing me, and I couldn’t go to sleep about it. … It was important for me to let people know just where I came from and that I see what’s going on.”

TrigNo and Soop first connected in 2018 or ’19, following a show TrigNO performed alongside Columbus rapper and frequent Soop collaborator Trek Manifest. From the jump, Soop said he was drawn in by TrigNO’s double-jointed flow and his professional approach, while TrigNO found new life in the dense, musically adventurous beats with which the producer presented him. Take “Plot Twist,” a deeply layered, crackling, corroded beat on which TrigNO lets go of past influences (“I used to wanna be Nas/But he ain’t me”) and announces an intent to stake out his own ground.

The two didn’t plan to make a full-length when loose sessions started a couple of years back, but after recording a trio of tracks – “I Like,” “Plot Twist” and “I Can Feel It” – they started to see a throughline developing and quickly realized there wouldn’t be a shortage of material. It helped, of course, that the two quickly developed a bond that far supersedes music, and which Soop credited as the key motivator that pulled him back to the control board amid the constraints of work and family life.

“It’s about how much I love you. Do my kids recognize you? Do they know your name? Does my dog start barking when you come in here? I’ve got an English Mastiff, and he don’t bark at Trig. He’s a fucking small horse, but when Trig walks in, it’s nothing,” Soop said. “A lot of people get it fucked up and think we just do collabs, like, ‘I’m nice. You nice. My beats are dope. Your rhymes are dope. Let’s put them together and see what happens.’ No. We built our relationship. And that’s the reason this shit sounds the way it sounds.”

TrigNO, for his part, credited this budding brotherhood with helping to draw out some of his more vulnerable verses, the rapped balancing playful braggadocio – “Verbally damage whatever my voice touch,” he boasts on “U Will Never Learn” – with comparatively revealing couplets about his coming up and the people who once ran with him but didn’t make it.

“And that’s really what drives me, just touching the people,” TrigNO said. “I’ve got nieces and nephews that look up to me. … I just want to make sure I fulfill my purpose and why I’m on this Earth. And it’s not just to be the greatest rapper or whatever. … It’s more about getting a message out there, teaching people about the consequences of their actions.”

From a big picture, documentarian point of view, album track “Technical Foul” probably presents the cleanest picture of how actual sessions unfolded, TrigNO bookending a series of neck-snapping verses with conversational asides in which he casually relays the events of the day (“I had some good chicken wings today”; “I went to Kroger and got what I needed”).

“We would play a beat then take a break and go up to the garage … where we would unpack real life. And I think that’s how these records came out,” Soop said. “Because we would take that building moment, and then we would go right back downstairs. And that’s when he gets to talking about his upbringing. That’s when he gets to talking about where he’s from, his childhood friends, the friends he still has, the friends he no longer has. … It was always cool to go upstairs and be like, ‘Man, what’s on your mind? How do you feel about that?’ And then we would go right back down, and he would literally pour that right back into the music.”

In the bond between the two, there also exists an awareness of Columbus hip-hop history. Over the course of our nearly two-hour interview, the rappers shout out the likes of DJ Pos 2, J. Rawls, DJ Rich Nice, DJ O Sharp and the late, still beloved Nes Wordz, whose tragic 2017 death left a crater from which the scene is in many ways still recovering, and whose presence remained visible throughout our Zoom conversation in an oversized Columbus Alive Bands to Watch banner set toward the rear of Soop’s basement. At multiple points in the interview, Soop alluded to the idea of TrigNO serving as connective tissue, of sorts, helping to move the work done by Columbus pioneers forward into the next era. “Trig can be trusted to grab this torch and carry this bitch,” he said bluntly.

TrigNO, for his part, sounded up for the challenge, eager to continue the thread while still comfortably standing on his own. “I’m in my own lane, and I don’t think anybody can do what I do when it comes to rap on a mainstream or local level,” he said.

This confidence ripples through tracks such as “Off the Rip,” on which TrigNO boasts of “rapping in my speaking tone” as a means of conveying the ease with which verses leave his lips. “When I say something like that, it’s just showing people I do this in my sleep,” he said. “Bars just come out when I’m talking sometimes. This is second nature to me.”