For over 25 years, Hip Hop duo Atmosphere has been churning out albums mixed with dark & inward-peering lyrics by Slug (Sean Davis) laid over slick beats by Ant (Anthony Davis). Since 1996, the duo has released twelve studio albums and ten EPs all while touring relentlessly and continuously fine tuning their craft.
“Every day can’t be the best day”, Slug raps on “The Best Day” (released way back in 2010 on the EP “To All My Friends”) which ended up being one of Atmosphere’s most popular songs to date. “I don’t know why people like it. It turned out to be one of our most popular songs, and I have no idea why,” Slug told Howard Hardee of the Inlander.
Maybe it’s the introspective nature of Slug’s lyrics “I had a rough day, but that’s life, it happens – Woke up on a dark side of my mattress…” that lured people to love “The Best Day” and Atmosphere in general or maybe it’s the ever-evolving DJ skills, beats, & finesse of Ant behind the scenes. It does take two to tango…
“So I did the Atmosphere thing where I write two verses about two different people, and then I write one about me. And if it wasn’t going to be a funny song, then it had to be about hope…” Slug reminisces about “The Best Day”.
Atmosphere’s hasn’t slowed down at all in the last couple of years, if anything, they’ve picked up the pace. In 2020, they released their eleventh album “The Day Before Halloween” on, you guessed it, the day before Halloween. On this album, Atmosphere switched things up again and incorporated Sci-Fi & Horror themes over spooky, synth-heavy backdrops.
Less than a year later, Atmosphere released their twelfth studio album “WORD?” in October 2021 and changed the game plan again. This time, they “came back home” and dove back into their signature sound found on their earlier albums.
Atmosphere has been in the game so long that their lives now look a lot different than they did back in 1996. Slug is now happily married and has a couple of kids. If you’re trying to find @Atmosphere online on social media, you’ll probably have better luck finding @Dadmosphere instead. Slug’s a dad now, after all. Time moves on and people evolve. How do the guys deal with it?
“I have no idea” Slug told Isaac Ford in an interview with UpcomingHipHop.net (I feel like we’ve heard this before?). “I feel like I just continue to try to capture whatever I’m feeling in that moment. I guess if things were to hit the fan and my life were to fall apart, you would probably hear that in my voice. If I’m lightly frustrated with my life, that’s going to sound a little different.”
As The Beatles said, “I get by with a little help from my friends” and Atmosphere is no different. Looking back at Atmosphere’s body of work and specifically Slug & Ant’s collaboration, Slug recalls “I’ll put it like this, ever since I started working with Anthony (Ant), we had started making so much music together that we realized what we were capturing were moods. I was always trying to make sure that the puzzle, the exercise, whatever you want to call it, that we were creating, was locked together.”
“I was locked in with the mood of the music, I was also locked in with the mood of whatever my narrative was. I was trying to join the music with the narrative, and me myself, I’m the brush. The beat was the canvas, the lyrics were the paint, I’m the brush, and I’m just trying to make this all lock together so it doesn’t feel like I could’ve wrote this over a different beat.”
Catch Atmosphere live in concert with Iration & special guests Katastro & The Grouch w/ DJ Fresh on Sunday, July 17th at Concrete Street Amphitheater on their “Sunshine & Summer Nights” Tour. For tickets & more info, please visit ConcreteStreet.net.
Ryan Butler 