Claud Six is an artist based in Portland, Oregon, but he grew up in Wisconsin. If you’ve ever spent time in the upper Midwest, you know that you’re never too far away from someone who knows someone with a spot on a lake, and they’d love to have you out sometime. In the case of Claud Six, his grandparents were the ones with lake access, deepening the connection to that life on bodies of water, sharing time with his family fishing, swimming, and just spending time with his family. As he got older and moved to the Pacific Northwest, he continued his love for that life by searching out new bodies of water with every cross country trip he took. As it so happens, Claud Six has a cousin who grew up on that lake in Wisconsin who also moved out west and got into beat making, now producing under the name jayrad. It just seemed like kismet that these cousins should reconnect as adults on the West Coast as hip hop artists, and it just seemed natural that the theme of their first project together would be lakes, which is now here in the form of Lake Lovers (Stories From the Shore).

Claud Six has had a long and varied career at this point, but one of the things that has been a throughline throughout all of the different projects he’s been a part of is that he’s an excellent storyteller on the microphone. He has a penchant for weaving compelling narratives and using vivid imagery that really draws you in. So when it came time for this project, which essentially works as a collection of short stories all taking place on the shores of different lakes and rivers, I knew I was in good hands. What I didn’t know was the production of jayrad. As it turns out, jayrad has a similar style to a few other producers that Claud Six has worked with over the years, and one that works perfectly for a project like this. It’s really beautiful and melancholy, with a lot of space to breath, along with lots of subtle and intricate moments of instrumentation that can be dialed up at just the right moment to make an emotional moment land. It’s rooted in hip hop, but there’s an indie-electronic quality to it as well. The production is so mature and nuanced and unique, you’d think that jayrad would also have a discography a mile long. When you pair this with Claud Six’s raspy low voice, conversational flow, and these vignette’s about lake life that move between personal first-person narratives to more observational third-person narratives, you get a really unique hip hop album. It’s one that you definitely want to listen to one-on-one, where you can really lose yourself in the music and the storytelling and just be in the moment.

Claud Six has given us a lot of interesting and varied projects over the years, but he still manages to find new angles to surprise and delight us. It turns out that his cousin jayrad is a hell of a producer, and it turns out that short stories about life on the lake is exactly what we didn’t know we needed from hip hop.