surrounded by hounds and serpents

The title of Powfu’s debut full-length album reads like a cry for help coming from inside pop music’s most exclusive VIP room. That’s where the British Columbia artist (né Isaiah Faber) found himself in 2020 after crafting the definitive slack-rap jam of the pandemic, “death bed (coffee for your head)”, a bleary-eyed anthem that catapulted him into the billion-stream club. That sudden success threatened to thrust the bedroom beatmaker out of his natural environment and into a place where he was, as his record puts it, surrounded by hounds and serpents. “When you start getting more famous, a lot more snakes start popping up—you realise there’s a lot of people that want to be friends just because you have money,” Powfu tells Apple Music. “That’s a big reason I didn’t move to LA—a lot of people out there are just constantly trying to hustle you. I like staying out in the forest up in Canada. There’s more privacy, and I can do more of what I want to do by myself.” As Powfu tells it, the only thing that really separates his first proper album from his previous EPs is the greater number of songs. “I always try to keep the same lo-fi vibe to all my releases,” he says. “Most of my fans became fans because of the chill, sad stuff, so I want to keep those people intrigued.” But while the record mostly sticks to his signature sonic palette, surrounded also charts Powfu’s continued growth as an artist and a (now-married) young adult. Though he still gets a lot of mileage from revisiting the eternally fraught emotional terrain of high-school heartbreak, his songwriting is also imbued with deeper expressions of love and faith. And where his childhood love of pop punk has traditionally formed the melodic foundation of his emo-trap tracks, this time out, he makes a more concerted play for the mosh pit. Here, Powfu provides a track-by-track guide to his ongoing evolution. “shade of blue” [Powfu, Rxseboy, tia tia & Shalfi] “I was going through TikTok maybe a year ago, and I came ac