Long-developed friendship forms backbone of new ‘Duo’ EP from Joey Aich and Dave Zup

Joey Aich and Dave Zup first connected around 2018, though the two were previously aware of one another, having come up in tandem in the Cleveland music scene. Despite this history, though, both said the pair’s new EP, Duo, released earlier this week, could not have been recorded until recently, describing the relationship developed over time between them as intrinsic to the music.

“The music is important to us, but more than that, I want to make sure Dave and his family are cool,” said the Columbus rapper Aich, joined by Zup for a late January interview. “I love that we can talk on the phone, and he can talk about … how [his 2-year-old son] has a name for the vacuum.”

“Dude, my son calls the vacuum Ray and he has to hug it every morning,” Zup said, and laughed. “And it’ll be like, ‘This fucking kid.’ But it’s just stories like that, where we riff off being friends and then the music comes from that. We couldn’t have made this project when we first started hanging out. We had to build that connection first.”

“Find a Friend,” which kicks off with a brief spoken word passage courtesy Zup’s 72-year-old uncle (“To me, a friend is somebody you need because you like them; you don’t like them because you need them”), documents this construction process. Working atop a jazzy, horn-flecked beat by Zup, a Cleveland-based rapper and producer, the two trade lyrically smooth verses about the sometimes-bumpy roads they have traveled in pursuing a life in music and the comfort they discovered in finding somebody else who could relate so purely to that experience.

“We touch on all of this stuff that has just been taking up space in our minds as artists, as older artists,” Zup said. “I’m 32, and I’m two years older than Joe, and there’s that element where people are like, ‘Hey, bro, you’re still rapping? That’s cool, but what do you have to show for it?’ And me and Joe, we have the same idea. I’m over here like, no, I’m not rich. … But I’m working with my friends, still growing, still learning.  And those are all successes.”

These ideas crystallize most cleanly in “Ohtani,” which opens with a verse Aich penned at age 29 – a point in time when a new decade was bearing down on him like a freight train. “Time’s tickin’/Hope these lines stickin’,” he raps, going on to acknowledge the doubts harbored by those closest to him in regard to his chosen path. “For me, I was doing a lot of things I deemed successful,” said Aich, pointing to his performance at the 2023 WonderBus Music Festival as just one example, “and a lot of people were looking at me like, ‘I guess it’s not happening for you yet.’”

Similar ideas are surfaced the head-spinning “Dizzy,” which centers on a lush, slightly off-orbit beat and opens with Zup rapping about how outward appearances (“All my dreams born under the same 40-watt”) might obscure the more radical changes that have taken place within him over the last decade-plus.

A few years ago, prior to connecting with Aich, Zup said he had reached a point of stagnation, describing these lulls as part of a constantly cycling artistic process in which creative outbursts are followed by stretches of self-doubt, inaction and reassessment. 

“The first time you and I spoke, Andy, was for my EP, Vignettes, back in 2021. And that was the first project I had made in five years, because I was … taking time to ask who I was as an artist,” Zup said. “And it’s not like you make one project and figure it out. It’s a journey. … And I would say from Vignettes to making ‘Siren Time,’ it was this whole big period of figuring out, like, ‘Yo, it’s okay if you never hit this stratosphere you once thought you could make it to at [age] 18 or 19.’ And also, I don’t really want that anymore. I’m married. I have a kid. I have a fucking mortgage. There are other things I want to do. But it was figuring out how I could learn and grow as a person and still make art.”

The opportunity to score a couple of movies helped Zup along in this process, including the short film “We All Say God,” which premiered at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles in February 2024. The experience forced Zup to stretch himself in terms of his craft – “As a beat maker, as a hip-hop guy, I had a lot to figure out,” he said – enabling the producer to develop a new set of tools that he’s been able to apply to the music he’s made in the time since. As just one example, he pointed to the beat he crafted for “Siren Time,” a song off of Aich’s Open Treehouse album, comparing the process of making the track to “scoring a little mini movie.”

“And then you get into ‘Find a Friend,’ the first song off of Duo, which is super cinematic to me,” Zup said. “It’s got a depth … that I don’t think I could have [reached] as a producer before. I don’t think I could have made that before learning how to work with other artists, or learning how to work with Joe, or making ‘Ohtani,’ ‘Siren Time,’ things like that. Everything learned was a lesson to get us to this point.”