cLOUDDEAD

The debut album from American supergroup cLOUDDEAD, it was released on May 1 2001, and has become a cult classic, decidedly underground and incredibly innovative. It may be one of the first examples of “cloud rap,” with sparse beats and at times nonsensical lyrics sung and rapped at a lazy pace.

They’ve been incredibly vocal in subsequent years about the record. It was released on Mush Records, and member David Madson of Odd Nosdam said:

Mush at that time were putting out trip-hop and dance stuff, really nice, clean house music and all of a sudden we came along with this weird ambient shit and we were like ‘He might hate this stuff!’ Thankfully, though, Robert is very open-minded and he totally got what we were doing, he was like ‘This is pretty cool, go ahead and do some more stuff and I’ll put out a little series of 10-inches.’

A huge retrospective interview was released by self-titled in 2014, which looks at their entire career and speaks on the creation of this record.

I made a beat, which became “She’s Calling”—the first track on our first album. I was driving in a terrible snowstorm from Minneapolis with Yoni, and somehow we ended up off the road in an embankment. We missed a tree by this much, and we almost died. It was the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Later on, we were at an AAA station. I remember we were like, “We gotta do this.” That, for me, is when cLOUDDEAD began. We didn’t even have a name for it yet.