Gus had come home to New York in the end of May, completed the second half of crybaby, and then someone paid for his plane ticket to return to Los Angeles on June 8. The next day, Gus dropped crybaby. Gus’s living situation plans fell through. So, he stayed for a while with a friend named Elias. Gus was busy trying to make music with a multitude of collaborators while he was staying at Elias’s house.
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Gus made California Girls when he was living in Long Beach, during the winter of 2015-2016. He made every one of the six tracks on California Girls with a friend he had never met in person-- @nedarbnagrom. He wrote and recorded these songs at night, and made videos during the day, while I was at work.
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Gus made Hellboy in LA. Some people say Hellboy was Gus’s “breakthrough” mixtape. And certainly many of Gus’s fans became fans because of Hellboy. Hellboy is a gritty, raw, and very intense piece of work in which Gus expresses feelings of anger, sorrow, loneliness, and determination. It is passionate. It is daring. And it kicks. It showcases Gus’s love for the guitar. The songs Gus chose to make Hellboy arose from his work with a small group of producers. These young men sampled some great, classic guitar riffs and combined them with the signature 808s for Gus to lay his vocal on and really wobble your rear view mirror.
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Gus left Denver in April 2016 and went back to LA. He ended up staying with his friend and old house-mate, Brennan Savage, in the house they had first moved into in September 2014—When Gus was hoping to go to Glendale Community College with Brennan. Now, nearly two years later, Lederrick and Yung Goth were there, too, as were several other young men. The place was full of people and creative energy. During all that time, Gus began to make the tracks for the Crybaby mixtape.
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After Christmas, Gus worked with a budding, local, Long Island director named Jon Francois—who goes by the name of Legacy—to make videos for two of the tracks that he decided to release on a four-track EP called Vertigo. All four of those tracks were produced by John Mello (and one was co-produced with Hector Vae).
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