Today Terrell Hines releases the video for “Get Up,” shot in Quebec at an abandoned Asbestos Mine and directed by Mishka Kornai, the song is off Hines’ debut EP on Capitol Records, St. Mark Rd.. Watch the video HERE.
Hines is not only a songwriter, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer with influences as broad as Outkast, Joy Division, Four Tet, and Gullah music, but his mind isn’t quite like other people’s. It’s no wonder Berklee College of Music gave Hines a full ride, or that people’s first exposure to his vision came during a 2019 Apple Keynote — that song, the rip-roaring avant-hoedown “Get Up,” hails from St. Mark Rd. EP, and is a mere peek into the wildness that’s coming.
Pharrell Williams. Chris Martin. Sky Ferreira. Dev Hynes. Well-known names involved in Beck’s new album Hyperspace. But for the album’s title track guest vocals are from Terrell Hines, a new artist who has yet to release a full album, yet whose music contains multitudes in the way it blurs all manner of genres into one big urgent, beautiful, hyper-dynamic ball of energy.
Yes, the core of his sound is a living mix of eerie soul, alt-pop, hip-hop, post-punk, and southern funk, but Hines is a world-builder with a voracious mind. This Georgia-born, Los Angeles-based visionary has created an entire ecosystem for his songs, where sonic structures and lyrics are just as likely to be inspired by the socio-political as they are the personal, by functional architecture as abstract art, by the austere science of survivalism as the limitless potential of technology. The best part is, you don’t have to know all that to feel the holistic magic of Hines’ work. We hear immediacy, exuberance, freedom, and ingenuity — music as surprising as it is captivating — while he sees a burning question: “If shit popped off and society had to be rebuilt,” asks Hines, “how would I do it?”
The concept that drives his music — an even split of postmodern and post-apocalyptic — is how he funnels all his obsessions into what he does best. He’s a renaissance man who can be found devouring books on linguistics, synesthesia, or evolutionary psychology in his downtime. Or considering which metals one would want to gather following a catastrophe, then actually sampling those metals in the studio. “I’m trying to engineer the future,” says Hines.
