PeaceofMND brings listeners to the ‘LIGHT!’

These are dark times said the Columbus producer and rapper PeaceofMND, born De’Mani Moore, who leaned into his 2025 album, LIGHT!, as a purposeful counter to the often-harrowing social and political realities existent in the United States but also worldwide, pointing to genocides that have unfolded in Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere.

“And there’s just so much grief amongst that. And, at the end of the day, we still have to search for love, and we still have to search for community as a means to gain, once again, light,” PeaceofMND said in late December. “Joy is an act of resistance. And you see it even in the last couple of days with people going out to [the hotels] where ICE is staying, where they’re playing loud music and dancing. They’re resisting, but they’re doing it in community. A lot of the songs on LIGHT!, they’re a way of me speaking to things, like, ‘Hey, this is something you need to pay attention to.’”

This idea surfaces most cleanly on “Searching4,” given an assist by the singer Madison Gibbs, on which the PeaceofMND balances production as warm and inviting as a spring garden with verses that center on the idea of building back in the aftermath of some larger collapse. “Piece by piece/Put the puzzle back together/Glue it tight,” he raps in his enveloping, sing-song cadence. “Hold hands/Grip with all might.”

PeaceofMND traced this pull toward hope back through childhood, describing himself as someone who always felt preordained to be “a light guider,” as he termed it. “I’ve always been that way as a person in general. The person where it’s okay to feel scared, where it’s okay to feel emotional, it’s okay to feel vulnerable. And that can give off a comforting sense, and helps other people feel the same way as you,” said the rapper, who then went on to credit nourishment in addition to nature. “I grew up in a home where there was a lot of support given. … And the fact that you have a family that supports what you want to do and want to achieve, and that allows you to be vulnerable and holds an open space for communication, I think that also helps.”

Allowing this more intimate voice to take shape on record has been more of a process, however, with PeaceofMND’s earliest rhymes inspired by the likes of MF Doom, where his words and syllables combined to paint more surrealistic, freeform pictures. Indeed, the rapper allowed that he is a visual creator by nature, his earliest musical productions emerging as companions to the animated shorts he began to make in his years as a student at CCAD.

“At the time, I really wanted to combine cartoons with music, but I didn’t want to use other people’s music because I didn’t want to get sued,” PeaceofMND said, and laughed.

Part of the more fully formed voice that emerges on LIGHT! can be attributed to the impacts of age, with the musician saying that he didn’t have the experience to offer much more than lyrical flights of fancy when he started recording at age 15. “I feel like it was around 2019, when I turned 21, that’s when I was able to start speaking from personal experience, and when I started to believe I had things to say that could relate to people outside me when it comes to how you feel mentally, emotionally,” said the rapper, who documents this creative evolution on the album track “Hunnidtimes.” “You just keep taking in more knowledge and information, and then there are things you have to go through, things you have to learn. And all of that helps to shape your art.”