Three summers ago, quinn—then 17, a shape-shifter in human form—was pacing the Lower East Side, BeReal app open, posing for snapshots with wide-eyed high schoolers. BeReal, in its reductive brilliance, promised nothing more than showing your “true self” once a day, but the self is never simple. Quinn’s online personae were scattered like digital breadcrumbs: jungle experiments under Cat Mother, NTS mixes under DJ Weird Bitch, ambient dispatches under Feeler, aggro throwaways under Rifleman. Somewhere in the chaos lived the real person—a ridiculously gifted producer, rapper, and curator of her own contradictions. Her detritus captured a tension that defined the BeReal era: “realness” as cohesive identity, and “realness” as watching coherence unravel.
That afternoon in New York, quinn faced a new test of authenticity: her first live show. No filters, no audience of anonymous scrolls—just people encountering her physically, in three dimensions. Listening to Before You Press Play, her new collaborative album with friend FearDorian, conjures that same jittery, electrified energy: the thrill of balling out, mixed with the trepidation of becoming something larger than yourself. Quinn, 20, and Dorian, 19, are sample-happy wunderkinds negotiating adulthood in real time. The album is “fun,” quinn promised—and yet, when you’re no longer a child, fun comes with a complicated aftertaste.
The premise is straightforward: two precocious producers link up again, this time for a full-length statement. What emerges is a tension between FearDorian’s bleary-eyed hypnagogia and quinn’s clipped, jagged rage. Dorian’s vaporwave-inflected loops now come freighted with punchy flexes, like on the groggy “world pleaser,” where whispered boasts collide with a laugh track (“Kirk a nigga, put him on a shirt, ask him ’bout freedom then”). It’s a studied chaos, beautiful in its messiness, like a Showbiz! track through the lens of James Ferraro. Yet the album sometimes betrays its youth: on “distance,” Dorian wades into a joke about not being a family man—“I can’t be a family guy, bitch, I’m not Peter/I can’t be a family guy, bitch, I’m not Lois”—and the line lands more childishly than it intends, proof of growing pains still in progress.
Where the album shines is in its simplicity. Quinn finds loops and corners to run laps around: on “so i don’t forget,” her flow tangles and skates across rattling percussion; on “burnt up,” FearDorian’s grotesque, gleeful tirade lands like a shockwave, making the listener squirm in complicity. Both artists are restless with form—rarely does a track end where it begins—and their collaborative chemistry balances their sprawling instincts. Dorian’s SoundCloud pastiche of Bar Italia flips, Tirzah reworks, and TAGABOW touches confirms his eclecticism, while quinn’s precision keeps the album tethered.
Before You Press Play is, at its core, about negotiation: between friends, between impulses, and between adolescence and the world outside. When quinn and Dorian accommodate one another, the album becomes a small, open-eared manifesto for a hip-hop community in formation, a celebration of fun, experimentation, and the awkward, exhilarating process of becoming.
About the Author
