AVAILABLE NOW: Frankie Carerra – “Frankie Carerra”

The music, rhymes and flow of Chicago-based rapper, singer and multi-instrumentalist Frankie Carrera represent an introspective and surreal aural journey–a hazy time-lapse portrait of survival, grit and grace, hauntingly captured on his official self-titled debut. Imagine regaining consciousness, washed up on a Cabo San Lucas shoreline, face down, sand in your teeth, beaten with your wallet and belongings gone, with severe neck and spine trauma: Injuries you don’t even detect right away for all the adrenaline pumping through your system, mysteries clouding your mind, and anger steadily rising to test the gauge of your emotional content and character.

Mere hours before, you were celebrating your return to Mexico’s party capital, about to share a sold-out Saturday show days later with superstar Waka Flocka Flame at the legendary El Squid Roe, a double-bill that you as a co-promoter were bringing to town. After leaving a small bar near the Marina with a Texas dream girl on your arm and three others, suddenly the last thing you remember is running. This is ground zero for the seven songs of Frankie Carrera. Pulsing at the center of this feverish and sensuous offering is the cyclical dichotomy of sweet dreams and bitter reality, propelled by the audacity to maintain hope and faith.

 Frankie Carrera boasts hallucinogenic tracks produced by aural illustrators Bread Doe, Yuya Michael Ohashi, and Millz, among others–swimming in synths and sound effects yet punctuated with the live instrumentation of piano and trumpet. Short songs in which vivid verses burst out of the Andy Kravitz mastered tracks that keep the listener steadily pushing rewind, submerged into the mindset of a man piecing his puzzle back together. 

 “I felt like this was what everyone would want to hear,” Carrera states. “I was in a recording studio after my surgery in a neck brace on Percocet, stiffened up by a permanent screw in my spine and out of my element. Bread Doe assured me, ‘No, this is it. I can hear your pain. This is your Through The Wire moment.'” This studio session resulted in the track “Medication.” “Making this music takes me back to Mexico. Coming home from paradise to Chicago where these streets don’t ever change with folks dying every single day, I turn my nightmares into dreams,” Carrera states. “The experience gave me a bitter taste of the world. So I said I’m going to ground myself, regroup out in L.A. and come back with something real that my fans will appreciate and respect. I could have just faded away but I came back even better with a sound that is shocking.”