We met up with the NYC-based rapper in Manhattan and discussed his ties to Connecticut, the origins of Surf Gang, PUNK GOES DRILL, and more
Polo Perks pulls up to the studio on a skateboard. It’s an unseasonably warm April Friday in Midtown Manhattan, and the postgrad professionals of Murray Hill and Kips Bay are flocking to their first rooftop booze-fests of the spring, but Polo has work to do. He daps up Goner, the NYC-born producer who runs a small recording space near Times Square, while Goner waits for his delivery sushi to arrive.
Once dinner is secured, the duo takes an elevator to the same room where they crafted much of Polo’s latest mixtape, PUNK GOES DRILL. The setup is bare bones — there’s a standing mic, a desktop, a few wall tiles for soundproofing, a couple of computer chairs, and a couch with an ashtray full of spliffs on the armrest. But for Polo, who made his first songs on Xbox headsets and busted iMacs, it’s more than enough.
Polo Perks, who stylizes his name as POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3, was born at Lenox Hill Hospital in 1994. He spent his earliest days in Harlem, his middle school years in Connecticut, and his high school years in the Bronx. As a youth, he took an interest in skateboarding and fashion, and found himself captivated by the pop-punk and alt-rock jams that used to dominate FuseTV’s daily countdowns. Many of those formative musical influences would later resurface in his work as a rapper. An incomplete list of 2000s bands that Polo Perks has sampled or interpolated includes My Chemical Romance, Motion City Soundtrack, Snow Patrol, Say Anything, The Killers, Hellogoodbye, and I Set My Friends in On Fire.
As a high schooler in the South Bronx, Polo ran into legal trouble. By his senior year, he found himself caught up in the court system for a handful of minor infractions. He ran afoul of the judge’s terms more than once, and ended up serving jail time as an 18-year-old.
After serving his time, Polo left New York and took refuge at a friend’s place in Connecticut. He became more focused on his hobby of cutting freestyles, and edited his first music video with footage from a wild house party in the affluent, predominantly white town of Westport. The clip went locally viral, and Polo made a name for himself in CT’s insular music scene.
While crashing on various couches and extra beds across Connecticut, Polo experienced a betrayal that almost derailed his career. One of his close friends, who had access to his social media accounts, stabbed him after an argument, then erased his SoundCloud and Instagram pages from the internet. The incident left Polo ready to give up on rapping, until a handful of friends talked him into dropping “Trendy Shit,” a puckish loosie in the vein of early Playboi Carti. The song resonated online, earning 20k plays in two days on SoundCloud, and Polo was back in the game.
With a smattering of EPs and singles under his belt — including collabs with SoundCloud pioneers like Nedarb and the late Hella Sketchy — Polo moved back to New York and connected with a new team of beatmakers, namely Harrison and Evilgiane. Harrison’s home studio on the Lower East Side became Polo’s creative headquarters, and his sessions there introduced him to Queens rappers Bobainee and Moh Baretta, and a white rapper from Nyack, NY who went by Ppgcasper. Around the same time, Evilgiane founded his own collective of skaters and misfits called Surf Gang. Many of the artists who frequented Harrison’s studio would eventually become Surf Gang affiliates, as Evilgiane branched out further into music and began recruiting kindred spirits to help realize his vision. The group now includes rappers Babyxsosa and Pasto Flocco and producers Tommytohotty, Skrap, and EERA, among others — though Polo insists they’re no longer welcoming new members.
Following his return to NYC, Polo refined his rumbling baritone and dove headlong into Evilgiane and Harrison’s starscape production. Mixtapes like 2019’s I.C.F.M and 2020’s Moretolifethanthis (three days) came out stranger and more self-assured than anything he’d released prior. While I.C.F.M standouts “For Real (Slide on Me)” and “ilovenewyork” established his melodic rap bona fides, Moretolifethanthis leaned into Polo’s idiosyncratic taste. The latter project offered twisted interpolations of The Used and Hall & Oates, and its cover art paid homage to My Chemical Romance’s breakout album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.
Polo’s most recent full-length, PUNK GOES DRILL, takes his love of left-field samples to dizzying new heights. His Surf Gang compatriots flip everything from My Chemical Romance’s “Helena” to blink-182’s “Adam’s Song” to “Crave You” by the Australian electronic duo Flight Facilities, while Polo burrows his voice into the mix with a hypnotic sense of rhythm.
Surf Gang appears primed for a banner year in 2021, and PUNK GOES DRILL has sparked fresh interest among fans and tastemakers. After 10+ years of making music, Polo Perks is arguably more popular than ever. He still hasn’t signed a record deal, and he’s not counting on one.
Toward the end of our interview, Evilgiane and EERA arrive at Goner’s studio for a recording session. Reading the room, I wrap up my conversation with Polo and bid farewell to the group of young artists. As I stop to use the bathroom on my way out, I can already hear a moody guitar sample, echoing through the hallways.
These excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity.
Underground Underdogs: You have wide-ranging and eclectic taste in music. Who were some of the artists that blew your mind as a kid?
Polo Perks: I was fully into rap music, but I tried just going off into other shit. My taste started going into other places. As far as rock music, Nirvana, Neil Young, that’s OG shit. You also got Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, Motion City Soundtrack, them n***as go dumb hard. Mayday Parade. Hellogoodbye, they’re one of my strong influences. Anything I do with auto-tune, I try to keep in range on some Hellogoodbye shit. I don’t try to do some Rod Wave shit or anything like that. When I think of auto-tune, I think of “Shimmy Shimmy Quarter Turn.”
Did bouncing between New York and Connecticut have an impact on the kind of music you were absorbing?
It definitely did. When we first moved to CT, we used to drive back and forth from New York, in this fucking Toyota Corolla. Deep as fuck in a Toyota Corolla, my whole family. Out there, the radio is just ass. There’s no Hot 97, none of that shit. So we would be stuck listening to — what was it? WBS-1 something. You know what I’m saying? Just this trash ass shit you only get in the hills and the valley out there. That’s how I got into the older type of rock music and stuff like that.
That’s where my song “Richgirl” comes from, the influence of “Rich Girl” by Hall & Oates. I used to hear that song every morning driving back and forth from New York. And then one day I just got hip to it. I was like, “Fuck it, this shit is kinda hard.”
You’ve been making music since you were around 14. Do you remember your first song, and what the studio setup looked like?
Honestly, my first freestyle video, I don’t even know what the fuck I was doing. I was in the Bronx, on like 174th and some block. This is back in the day, when Bronx whining and shit was popping. So we’re in this little dance party, and some older heads from the building are in the hallway spitting and shit. But I didn’t know it was a freestyle video that they were doing. I was just trolling and hyping them up, and n***as filmed my fat ass [laughs.] Made me freestyle.
After I did that shit, it got a hundred views in like a month, and I was like, “I’m going up. I gotta drop another one.” My brother Cory, he was already freestyling. They were coming up out of Brooklyn, for this shit called 730TV. It was some freestyle shit, and they were already getting thousands of views.
Cory had a falling out with them, so he went off to pursue his own music. He was like the big brother to me in this shit. We just started recording at his crib. I started skipping school every day, literally recording off the Xbox microphone headset, and using Audacity.
Were you guys making beats back then?
Nah, we were YouTubing everything. We started off with type beats and shit. I was into Tyler, The Creator type beats. He was into French Montana and Max B type shit. Our first song that we put out was a remix of “Drank In My Cup” by Kirko Bangz. This is all like … dark times [laughs.]
How would you describe your high school years in the South Bronx?
Trash. Trash as fuck. At school, I only had like three or four friends — no bullshit — and I skipped school every single day.
I actually tried to get back on it. Junior year, I went back to school and I killed it. My senior year, I was doing good. I was about to graduate, and I started getting into gang shit and dumb shit. One day, a kid came to school with a gun, trying to shoot at me. I was fighting a case at the time, for a gun, and they wrote a note to my judge stating what had happened. My judge was like, ”Nah, you can’t go back to school.” So he forced me to go find a GED program, and I never even gave a fuck about that. I was like, ”Fuck this.” I wasn’t complying, that’s how I ended up back in jail.
What kind of rap was popular among your peers around this time?
High school days, it was Chinx, French Montana, Max B, Wiz Khalifa. Everything Wiz Khalifa. Curren$y. What else was in high school? Phoenix on the rock music side. Tyler, The Creator heavy. Earl heavy. Frank Ocean heavy. Domo Genesis heavy. Riff Raff heavy, for some odd reason. I was fucking with Action Bronson. Action Bronson and Kanye had this humorism. They influenced how I use humor in my music. They were just able to describe a situation and break it down in a way that was fire to me. Who else? Fall Out Boy. I was listening to Fall Out Boy ten years straight.
That “Sugar We’re Going Down” video was a FuseTV classic.
That was the first video I had seen, then “Grand Theft Autumn.” After that, I bought … well I didn’t buy the album. I went to the Stratford library in Connecticut, and I asked them if they had From Under The Cork Tree. They were like, ”Nah but we’ll order it.” They ordered it, and I rented it, and never took it back. I was like, ”Yes sir! Got it.” Then they had the deluxe version. I went back and got that one, had no problems.
When you got out of jail, you were 19, and you moved back to Connecticut, right?
Right out. Couldn’t do New York. I was already out in the city for like a week and a half, and I got locked up for some petty shit. Just being outside, drunk as fuck on the block chilling. I was like, “Nah. I’m off this.” I was only in the city because when I came home, I went to community college for a week. Literally for that week only. Then I dubbed it.
Who did you move in with?
One of the homies that I grew up with out there. His mom was just tired of him. So she got him an apartment, paid it off for two years. He had a baby on the way and shit, but he was like, ”Bro, I got a three bedroom crib, if you want to situate your shit out, and you can also get back into music.” At the time, I wasn’t even caring about music. I was almost like … a regular civilian. I was in college, like what the fuck was I doing?
I slept in this house for like a week. We got an iMac, and I was just recording off that shit for a little bit. After about a week, we went to this big-ass party. It was like every high school within the Fairfield County region at this one house. We got mad footage from it, chopped it up, put it together, threw in some other footage, and made a music video for a song called “Wulf.” It was an Xavier Wulf remix. That shit went pretty viral for a local n***a.
Were you surprised that your music made an impact with the preppy white kids out there?
Hell yeah. I just was fighting a gun charge, and going through so much. Now I’m chilling in Fairfield, Connecticut. Getting invited to big ass mansion parties, and doing hella shit that I wasn’t doing in the hood.
At some point while in CT, you had a falling out with one of your friends. As I understand it, he stabbed you and took your SoundCloud page down?
Yeah, that was one of the other homies. I didn’t have none of my family out in CT, so a lot of my homies were helping me. But yeah, hating-ass n***a.
How much did that set you back as an artist?
I was not going to do music again whatsoever, in any way, shape, or form. One day, one of the homies asked me, “Bro, do you care about music anymore?” I was like, “I’m up n***a. I got 13 bands. I’m straight, I don’t give a fuck about music.” He ended up uploading one of my songs, and it got like 10k plays. That was more views than I had on my last page.
I didn’t really have a recording situation. Connecticut is dry for music. So we had to do it wherever the fuck we was able to do it. I remember we were crashing at the homies crib. We didn’t record nothing the whole night. We woke up the next day, and we’re trying to get the fuck out of the crib and couldn’t find a ride. I found this beat on YouTube. I’m like, ”This shit’s so hard, I’mma rap to it.”
When I opened the laptop, the battery was on ten percent! I was so tight. The n***a was taking dumb long to come scoop us, and he had the charger in his car. I’m like bro honestly, fuck it, I’m just gonna record it. “I fuck your thot then I’m gone / I fuck your thot then I’m off it / Trendy shit all in my closet.” Just little playful shit. You hear people in the background and everything.
When I finished, I closed the laptop and didn’t even care about it. A week later, my boy was like, ”Yo I cleaned that song up, you should hear it.” He sent it to me, and I’m in the bed with my shorty bumping it. She’s like, ”Damn this is hard! Who is this?” I sent it to my camera man, and he texted me rows and rows of fire emojis. He was like, ”If you don’t drop this song, that’s the dumbest shit you could do bro.”
I dropped the song at like 12 in the morning. I woke up, my shorty went to work, and I linked up with my man at like 11am. The song had like 1200 plays. I went back to the crib real quick, went back outside, it had 4,000. I was like, “What the fuck?” Next time I checked, it had 10,000. Next day, it’s almost 20,0000. I’m like, “Bruh, I really got a good song.” That’s what pushed it. That’s what finally pushed Polo Perks. “Trendy Shit.”
That song definitely has an off-the-cuff energy to it.
That song influenced me on how the fuck I do anything and everything now. The freestyling, I don’t write. The playfulness. If you listen to that song, it’s blueprint Polo.
You were an early adopter of SoundCloud. A lot of people who started out on that platform ended up signing deals or burning out, but you stayed the course independently. Is that something you take pride in?
Hell yeah. I could’ve blew up in 2015, when it was the whole TeamSesh wave. I could’ve blew up in the 2016 wave, the SoundCloud wave. I could’ve blew up in 2017, when it was still a SoundCloud wave, but sort of more for the hipsters, like Lil Skies and shit. 2018, when everybody was turning emo, I could’ve did all them phases. But this is my wave, and not just my wave, my friends’ wave, you feel me? Everybody that you see around, I’ve known for a long period of time. And if I haven’t known them for a long period of time, we’ve put in so much work that we both understand that we have the same goals, so you’re never gonna break that.
I noticed you’re quick to show love to your collaborators. From something as small as crediting your producers in song titles, to this whole community that you’ve fostered with Surf Gang. Why is it important to you to break bread and share your success?
Shit, I’ve known Evilgiane from the internet since the end of 2014, beginning of 2015. We really just talked, he never sent me beats until like 2017. Around 2017, Harrison is the person who brought me back into music. I was going through a lot of wacked out shit in 2017, 2018, you know what I’m saying? In 2018, that’s when I dropped the Misunderstood project, with “STARS” and “MIKE N IKE.” That’s some of the first production from Surf Gang. On the first day of chilling with Harrison and them, our first studio session, we all got dumb-high and passed out in the room. Literally, just dumb-high making beats, passed out in the room. Then we woke up and did the same thing again.
That’s what I needed in my life. I needed that type of structure. I needed the type of people that are on my side. It’s not that I’m a bad artist without them, it’s just the structure. They gave me a brighter light to understand that I actually am lit. So I give them n***as hella credit. I give them n***as credit for any song they make. I’ll shout ‘em out every song.
Even when people talk to me about Surf Gang, I’m like, “No, that is not my shit. That’s Evilgiane’s shit.” He worked hard from the ground up for that shit. I always make sure people understand who deserves credit.
We dropped so much crazy shit in the past year. Evilgiane and all my brothers, they sell beats for the super duper high now. I’m blessed to be in a situation where these are my brothers, so that price is out the window. We have the same goals. We’ve seen when we weren’t getting nothing for it. So now, it feels super good to shout each other out.
How did you first get formally involved with Surf Gang?
I got involved just on the music side. They had already been a thing in the city for a minute. They were just younger kids, kind of an outcast thing. I got into it on the music side, and we just turned it up. It was kind of a jokey thing at first, but n***as can’t joke about it now.
There’s been a lot of excitement around Babyxsosa joining Surf Gang. When did she come into the picture?
I found Babyxsosa on SoundCloud, on the bus. I hit her up, because I knew it. I just knew for a fact, this girl’s fucking got it. I was like, ”We gotta work, we gotta work, we gotta work.” I’ve never been more consistent with anybody. And one day she cracked, and was like, “Thank you so much.” I’m like, “Bro, fuck all that! We gotta work, dead serious. If you come to the city, push up.” We ended up chopping it up on the phone, and we locked in.
I hopped in the Surf Gang group chat like, “Who’s tryna produce some shit for me and Babyxsosa?” Harrison’s like, “I fuck with her, I got you.” Two days later, I’m on the internet and I see Babyxsosa produced by Evilgiane. I’m like, “Bro, you spoke to her already? Say less.”
She had a show coming up, and by then she was already comfortable with us. Off the rip, I knew this person was gonna be in my life for mad long. You can’t replicate this type of person. Whatever I say about her, she’s gonna say something crazier. She’s that elegant in her brain. Not just in her brain, she’s distinctive. How she sounds, acts, everything.
Did working in a small scene like Connecticut make you more proactive about reaching out to people that way?
It’s funny you say that, because that’s the only reason I have a linkage with Sosa. It was the small town shit. I once was living in a small town. Babyxsosa is from Richmond, Virginia. And people attach themselves to their city so strongly, because that’s all they got when you’re in a small town. “I’m doing it for the city!” It’s like bro, what the fuck is out here but gas stations? Ain’t shit out here. People gotta see other shit. I feel like because I dipped from a small town, I was eager to show someone else that there’s so much more out there.
The casual listener might not appreciate the nuances of your production choices on PUNK GOES DRILL. “Not Another Teen Movie” for example, samples I Set My Friends On Fire. That’s a MySpace band from a lifetime ago, and you’re just now bringing that influence to fruition.
To be real, I wish Goner was with me earlier today bro. I was going to get a sandwich, and this kid stopped me and started talking about PUNK GOES DRILL. He was like, ”This is the music I grew up on, but I had to keep in the shadows. The fact that a real n***a used all these samples makes me less shy about it, and more appreciative of it. The fact that you as a Black artist did this, there are so many people just like you. The Black kid who grew up on rock music, and had to keep it in the cut.” He FaceTimed his brother, like, ”Bro, look who I’m with!” And off the first rip, I could tell his brother was the same type of kid. They were both hyped.
When we pushed the project out, we knew it was gonna get the attention of the blogs. Because it was too natural, it was too organic, it was me. Everybody who produced it knows it’s me. The first session at Goner’s crib we ever had, we didn’t record for 30 minutes, because I was questioning him on what bands he listened to. I didn’t expect it to reach kids who were into the same music as me, because I felt like that music was forgotten about. No one ever touches the 2000s genres of anything, when it comes to sampling. It’s always the 70s, 80s, 90s. You know what I’m saying? The early 2000s, if we don’t keep that shit going, that shit is going to be forgotten about.
I have to ask about the Surf Gang show in L.A. What was that experience like?
That was crazy. From the ground up, that was beautiful. I got to be with everybody that I’ve been working with. Music coincides with my real life, you feel me? We see each other every day, it’s not like we can’t talk about our actual issues and shit. So the fact that I just did a packed out, fucking sold out show, with a kid who I randomly met through SoundCloud, if we’re being technical. And some other kid who was his friend, who encouraged me to come back to New York.
Even RealYungPhil and 1600J, I know them from Connecticut. RealYungPhil, he was an artist in a collective called Full Effect Boyz. One of the artists in that group ended up getting killed by the cops due to negligence, for no reason at all. His rap name was Gangstalicious, and he had crazy energy. So seeing Phil go from losing his brother, to standing in front of 500 people and rapping his music, this is something that we all came from. The same bullshit in Connecticut, trying to open up at the same shows and everything. We went from that, to doing live shows in L.A. together.
If you want to be technical, I randomly met Babyxsosa on SoundCloud too. It’s crazy if you think about the movement, where it came from, and where it was at that night.
Another name that comes up in your music a lot is Speedy. Can you tell me a little about who he was?
RIP Speedy. Speedy was the homie. He was another underground artist out of Connecticut that didn’t even get the chance to see his first music video. He was coming up, and he was the first one out of any of us to catch a break. He was under Black Market Mafia, with Sha Hef and them. He had a show at Webster Hall in New York, his first show, and he killed it. On his way back home, he got side-swiped by an 18-wheeler and he died.
Everything, literally, everything I do musically, is for Speedy. That was a kid that didn’t have family, slept house to house, couch to couch, car to car. You know what I’m saying? He only had friends. We had so many mutual friends. Everybody at a certain point in time was doing music. After he passed, that scene in Connecticut kind of died out. I’ll always mention him, not just for my purposes, but for the people who are still bumping me. The original people. They need to hear that.