The Sacramento artist discusses Hunter S. Thompson, No More Heroes, and how their creative take on digicore has evolved
SoundCloud’s digicore scene is usually recognized for its genre-bending instrumental palette. But what about its songwriting? 18-year-old Sacramento artist Saturn is one example of a digicore pioneer with a unique approach. They take the routine boasts and eccentric anecdotes that fill up the scene’s Notes apps and sharpen them until they’re visceral enough to rattle in your head. On a song like “Less Intro,” Saturn pushes the envelope of digicore lyricism: “I feel my arm decompose inside the acid — it vanished / I’m doing LSD for breakfast, not malnourished, I’m manic,” they rap. It’s intricate, but their angsty, singsong flow makes it approachable.
Their biggest song, “go white boy go,” has seen viral success: on the track, they intersperse some of their most piercing, quotable writing (“Bloody nose, think I messed up / I’m the hero, you look like an extra”) with a recording of themself eating a sandwich and soundbites from the game franchise Danganronpa. But scroll through their discography, and you’ll see years of history from a respected member of SoundCloud’s current renaissance — they’re already a scene elder at 18.
Saturn was an early member of the now-defunct bloodhounds collective, one of the spaces where digicore crystallized into what it is today, including at a 2019 live show. Like many SoundCloud collectives, bloodhounds began in the world of multiplayer games. Saturn remembers playing Minecraft “all day” at 16 with artists like kuru and d0llywood1. They watched the collective start to officially form in a group chat around June 2019, and joined it themself shortly thereafter. Since their first uploads on SoundCloud, Saturn’s kaleidoscopic, volatile pen has written them into the digicore canon. They haven’t grown complacent, though; they want to fine-tune their art until it meets the standards others have set for them. “Everyone thinks I’m this hotshot top dog,” they say, “but how do I actually become that in my own head?”
SoundCloud is familiar with personalities like Saturn; from Goth Money to Drain Gang to Anti-World to their digicore peers, artists have used the internet to seem like they’ve beamed in from different worlds. Like those before them, Saturn’s greatest strength is that they’re a convincing stylist. They veer from outlandish lifestyle raps into explorations of their favorite art and vivid descriptions of how their mind is processing it all. But instead of a patchwork of random references, it feels like a self-contained universe where they play multiple different characters. When Saturn’s imagination starts running wild on earlier songs like “omegle” — when they’re doing the “sped up, hard bass … crazy shit” that’s gotten them the most attention — they’re like a deep-internet cyborg, zooming from the science lab into airborne enemy encounters while scrolling through social media inside their brain.
The history of online music is full of persuasive characters in this vein who piece together their own worlds. But it’s also seen plenty of less-interesting interlopers who use their online presence to act as voyeurs of lifestyles they don’t lead, or neglect to repurpose innovators’ ideas as inventively as the originals. Whether a SoundCloud rapper like Saturn is enjoyable depends on whether listeners think they’ve actually crafted something engaging of their own from those signifiers. Drain Gang’s Swedish mysticist Bladee, for instance, started off his career by patterning himself off of songs like “Gucci Goggles” by DJ Nate — a forerunner of Chicago bop music — but grew into an icy, aloof persona that he took greater charge over, while still showing admiration of his favorite American rappers. Incidentally, artists like Saturn were often mistakenly named “drain clones” by outsiders in the early days of digicore. But their music is dramatically different. Saturn highlights their artistic progression: “Two years ago … I re-installed FL Studio and started making fuckin’ shitty drain music,” they say jokingly, but they’re proud of the futuristic absurdity they’ve refined since then.
There’s something compelling, but polarizing about seeing artists reach out towards their inspirations and finding these elaborate worlds in the online limbo. After all, when young rappers like Saturn are amassing all these references, do they understand the context of the cool aesthetics they’re drawing from? Songwriters on the Internet are often distinguished by how they approach this gap between themselves and their plugged-in imaginations; Saturn’s detachment from their source material is what makes them seem so otherworldly, but might also make it hard for some people to connect with them. Since they’ve dabbled in rapping about the kind of gunplay and rebellious antics that are separate from their actual day-to-day life, one could argue they’re merely adopting a superficial reading of what they’ve heard in rap without grasping what real-world ramifications that performance suggests. Saturn asserts that especially in recent months, they’re more complex and intentional with what they do.
For one, they say they aren’t just borrowing from the SoundCloud ether, or even from other musicians. Their music encapsulates all of their interests: you’ll notice lyrical nods to novels and mythology, and they’ll insert clips from games and TV shows directly into their songs. “Where I’m at with writing is an amalgamation of everything that’s influenced me, from games to movies to writing to media to art,” Saturn explains.
They propose that the straight-ahead violence and rap theatrics in their earlier lyrics “mostly came from a lack of inspiration,” and that as they’ve matured, they’ve tried to veer away from them towards more personal ideas, but that “the goal was always to make sure it was fantastical enough [that] you couldn’t take it seriously.” Saturn has attempted to moderate the arguably irresponsible handling of violent signifiers by rapping about more absurd weaponry like daggers, swords, and random things blowing up — on 2019’s “omegle,” they rapped: “Feel like Oprah, check under your seat for a moment / C4 on the bottom with the gum, it’s exploding.” Digicore’s staggering sense of genre-fusion often insulates the artists from crucial conversations about its specific rap influences and the ways it handles them; artists like Saturn often implement the same storytelling devices that movies and video games use to try and make action feel less grounded in an uncomfortable reality and more in an outlandish world of their own design.
Saturn comes across in their songs like they’ve memorized a bunch of wiki pages, but their unruly enthusiasm for this internet anthology hones these songs into anthems. Their eclectic web of influences, and the literate way they weave them into their words, balance the madcap fantasy in the writing with an intellectual edge. Instead of just indiscriminately throwing all of their source material into a blender and seeing what happens, they seek to carefully study and tinker with everything to figure out how each piece most fluently fits into their persona.
One of the more striking influences Saturn mentions is 20th-century American author Hunter S. Thompson. “I fucking love gonzo journalism,” they say. “When I read Fear and Loathing, I loved how blunt he was and how sporadic things felt. He was a very straightforward writer, but at the same time, you sort of felt like you were getting put all over the place with the way he described the situations going on around him.”
Thompson’s subjective, first-person style of journalism mirrors the musician’s approach as an online artist. Saturn’s goal isn’t to copy the stories of other people or mimic an existing fictional character, but to learn about the experiences in the art they like and channel them through their own psyche, looking for kindred spirits without losing their sense of self. This makes for an unpredictable writing process. Saturn says they want to “always show, not tell” in their lyrics. They enjoy the challenge of exploring non-musical ideas through songs, and aim to pack their writing with allusions that only they can understand.
Saturn also idolizes SUDA51, the developer behind the No More Heroes game series. “Whenever I make music,” they say, “I’m thinking lately: how can I make something as absurd and thought-producing as the games that SUDA51 makes?” The series’ protagonist, Travis Touchdown, is written by Suda — who is Japanese — as a crude, but sharp-witted American assassin who’s obsessed with media like anime and lucha libre. In that way, they’re similar to Saturn — a character whose action-fantasy persona plucked from seemingly everywhere can seem unsympathetic, but also fascinatingly fun.
Video games are Saturn’s favorite creative tools, because they let them live vicariously through characters from other worlds. “If I’m playing a game like No More Heroes and I’m swayed by someone like Travis Touchdown, I’m gonna be more brash and abrasive in whatever I’m making that day,” they say. Their current music works similarly: “I’m playing through Disco Elysium lately … in the stuff I’m writing right now, I’m pulling bits and pieces, I’m talking about dice rolls and stat checks, and my anthems are becoming less confident, more doubtful.”
“letz 5hake,” featuring and produced by Deth Coni, exemplifies this creative process. It sounds like how it feels to have hundreds of virtual enemies spawn in your field of view while you’re in such a hack-and-slash trance that you fuse with your controller. Audio clips from No More Heroes jumble Coni’s rubbery production, while Saturn harnesses the boldness of Travis, but still battles inner demons, contemplating suicide: “If things get rough one day, I might turn it on myself and blow.”
At the end of the song, Saturn pays homage to Midnight Society member Braxton Knight, saying, “He always inspired me to put the video game shit in my songs.” This nod is subtle, but reflects how Saturn thinks about musical lineage. Digicore is a community that regularly drives artists to debate over who came up with certain ideas out of fear that some people will get recognition that others deserve. The competitive atmosphere is understandable, since big opportunities are rare in the niche scene and money from SoundCloud streams can get scarce. But Saturn’s humility is refreshing — you’ll rarely see them vying for personal credit. They’ll brag about having “sons” in their lyrics as part of their persona, but outside of their songs, they don’t actually seem to care much about whether they or someone else is acknowledged for starting a trend.
“When people tell me I’m influential, I’m like — well, these other people were gonna make it with or without me being around,” they say. Although they appreciate the recognition, they don’t see themself as a standalone trailblazer; instead, they’re comfortable as part of an artistic continuum, finding new ways to augment their work with what’s around them.
Saturn’s latest work is their most high-concept and cerebral, evidence of how their artistry has shifted. Along with a physical reissue of their L.S.D. EP, complete with new features — and released via emerging outlet DREAMUTILATION — they’re planning two new projects: Santa Destroy (titled after the California city in No More Heroes) and Eyetestt, a collaboration with producer rhine1k. On the latter project’s first single, “Raise,” Saturn seems more reserved than usual, giving renewed attention to storytelling.
“I’m not really a faithful person myself,” Saturn says, “but I always seem to find myself ‘in the way’ of faith, and I thought that was interesting. So I wrote a song from the perspective of a pastor who’s lying to his people.” “Raise” also brings video games to mind. This time, rhine’s beat sounds like they’re peppering MIDI choirs from a castle stage into the tense beeps of a heart monitor. Saturn’s new, formalized attitude isn’t as off-the-wall as their earlier songs, but they write their character’s internal crisis of faith just as vividly: “Talk to disciples like they’re sheep / They’re well-aware I’m lying, but I know it brings them comfort, so I’ll brush up my speech.”
Many artists navigate the space between themselves and their digital worlds by charging full-speed-ahead, making the most in-your-face, boisterous music possible to try and pull it off. Saturn sometimes pursues a different angle. It’s up to the listener to decide whether they can connect with their referential outlook. But Saturn is skilled at keeping that space in mind while looking inward and taking stock of themself in their quest to perfect their craft.