How Danny Brown’s fearless collaborators shaped his new album Stardust

In a bedroom in Toronto, where laptop monitors glow violet, the two core members of femtanyl sit shoulder to shoulder. Noelle Mansbridge and Juno have been working together for years with this DIY set-up, rarely leaving the house. Raised on edgy Minecraft flash videos, they now make emotionally extreme digi-hardcore. They’re a niche act that, historically, have mainly been appreciated by a furry-adjacent corner of the internet. Danny Brown has changed that.

​“I feel strange about being someone that people have opinions on,” says Juno, grinning nervously. A year and a half ago, Juno (who officially joined femtanyl this year after collaborating with Noelle and playing live drums for the project) caught wind that Brown had posted a screenshot of femtanyl’s 2023 EP Chaser on X. At first, she thought it was a joke. A few months later, they were in a real studio in Austin, invited by Brown to write and produce on his tenth album, Stardust. He had discovered femtanyl himself. ​“No one had to show him shit,” Juno says.

Anyone who’s followed Brown’s career knows he’s never been afraid to veer left. Still, for an artist who’s spent the past fifteen years pushing rap forward while having close proximity to the mainstream – he’s traded verses with Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky, and sold out venues across the world — it was a genuine trip for femtanyl to get a message from him.

For the band, who built their own bedroom studio to avoid going outside, working with Brown was their first brush with professionalism. ​“Being in a studio space was very stressful and intimidating,” Juno recalls. ​“I knew people were paying a lot of money for us to be there.” Brown’s playfulness eventually disarmed them. He encouraged them to throw ideas around, elongate a vocal sample, pitch it up or down. ​“He expresses his feelings at every turn,” Noelle says. ​“It was almost shocking, to hear someone coming at it with such a sincere and powerful force.”

When Juno and Noelle saw the Stardust tracklist, they realised Brown had been working with a rollcall of similarly hyperstimulated, glow-brained artists: some of the greatest feelers and technicians of the post-Soundcloud age. ​“We were both like, ​‘fuck yeah’,” Mansbridge continues. ​“It made total sense. There’s zero degrees of separation between us.” Seeing their name beside the likes of Frost Children, underscores, and Jane Remover felt like affirmation. ​“For someone who’s such an extremely smart and artistic person to see the vision in us, that’s special,” says Juno.

That warmth and curatorial vision is the animating force behind Stardust, Brown’s first album written while sober. It’s AA-core: high energy and higher gratitude, the sound of someone rediscovering what they love, jubilantly rapping about life after rehab, proud simply to go to sleep and wake up as himself each day. For years, Brown’s music chronicled addiction and despair; Stardust is the sound of that story turning over, of Brown channelling joy, and the sheer, inexhaustible love of music itself.

Stardust​’s list of collaborators recalls the online music scene from the pandemic, when Soundcloud collectives multiplied in abundance and locked-down kids built universes in Discord servers. The difference now lies in the gravitational pull at its centre: Danny Brown, a famous rap veteran who never stopped wondering what might happen if he simply stayed curious. From Australian rabble-rouser Zheani to relative newcomer ISSBROKIE, these are collaborators who learned layering in Minecraft, refined their songs in bedrooms, and now make music with huge ambition.

Over the last couple of years, NYC-based sibling duo Frost Children have quickly shifted their sound from hyperactive digicore to breezy college rock and, on new album Sister, a pulverising but sentimental strain of EDM – show a fearless experimentalism which impressed Brown. He first congratulated them for their track Flatline appearing on the FIFA soundtrack, and last year, they met in Brown’s hometown of Austin and ended up writing, producing and singing on tracks which would end up on Stardust. ​“It was actually the first session for his new album, and he had a very clear list of artists he wanted to work with,” they tell me over email. ​“We love Danny’s nonstop curiosity about new sounds. It’s something we share, too.”

Brown, like Stardust’s collaborators, has spent a lot of his life online. He was internet-brained before that was an insult, having internalised the web’s humour and lawlessness in his own work. Hip-hop and the internet came of age in tandem, and Brown was there as both found their digital footing. His parents kept him mostly housebound in Detroit so he’d stay out of trouble, nudging Brown toward a family computer equipped with early broadband. He was one of the first kids in his neighbourhood to download Napster, rummaging through folders of mislabelled MP3s and low-bitrate leaks. That’s where he first encountered grime and the early-aughts UK rap scene – most crucially, Dizzee Rascal.

In Danny Brown’s music, you can trace the influence of Dizzee’s debut album Boy In Da Corner right back to the metallic thwacks on his breakthrough 2011 mixtape XXX, and it’s arguably still present on Stardust. ​“Yeah, it all feels very UK to me,” says April Grey, aka post-hyperpop star underscores over Zoom, her hair freshly cut into a jellyfish shape. ​“It’s almost like bassline: these electronic beats, crazy rapping, four-to-the-floor energy.” When she and Brown were working on the grimey, gabber-like track Baby – which she also sings on – she pored over vintage Dizzee production, pulling apart the double claps, helium-high squeaks, and fucked-up car-speaker basslines from I Luv U. Those details — meticulous and daring — became the track’s scaffolding.

​“He’s so tapped into the scene,” Grey says, noting Brown’s desire to check out underground talent. ​“He’s finding people I’ve never heard of before, artists with like, 300 monthly listeners. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Brown said underscores’ 2023 album Wallsocket soundtracked much of his time in rehab and was ultimately responsible for helping him ​“fall back in love with music.” ​“When I saw that interview I got pretty emotional,” says Grey.

Jane Remover is arguably among the most successful artists to emerge from the pandemic-era digicore movement. The 22-year-old has been supporting Turnstile on tour and selling out sizeable venues internationally with their headline shows, while racking up millions of streams with an ever-evolving output. But Remover has also been vocal about their indifference to the careerist churn, how songs become content, dissected and degraded online; they once told an interviewer that ​“there’s no such thing as a good fanbase.” But when Remover worked with Brown for Stardust​’s cinematic and earnest closing track All4U, they found his optimism was contagious.

​“I’ve had a more positive outlook on making music,” Remover says, calling from the greenroom of the Moody Amphitheater in Austin where they’re warming up for Turnstile. ​“Danny is one of the few people I look up to, and I feel like he has such an optimistic and grounded view of music because he really just does it for himself. He doesn’t care what people online or critics have to say. It’s literally just, if he’s happy, then that’s what goes.”

Remover, too, was ​“surprised by how easily it all came to be,” still in disbelief they ended up as collaborators. ​“He has a really good ear for music. He has great taste, and I have great taste too. The album’s so forward-thinking, so futuristic, but you can still tell it’s so Danny throughout.”

When Brown released Stardust​’s tracklist publicly on September 23, it became underground music’s Big Discourse of the day. Cynics said that Starburst’s guest list – a supporting cast of young, cultishly online, often queer artists – was a calculated play for subcultural clout. Remover bristles at that. ​“He’s not adjusting to fit a certain mould; he’s constantly making a mould for others to fit in,” they say. ​“Honestly, I read everything. People simply can’t put themselves in an artist’s shoes. They’re never going to truly understand why an artist did something. And it doesn’t just apply to Danny. It applies to any artist with a cult following online.”

Grey adds: ​“some people think there’s almost a kind of politics behind it. They think that if you co-sign somebody, it’s about getting into a circle. But I don’t see any of that here. He’s not trying to make a statement about identity. He just really fucks with the music.”

Ultimately, Remover thinks the debate is proof of impact. ​“The discussion’s good, and it’s divisive from the jump. And I think good music is always divisive.”

Though some fans might simplify these artists into easy categories, the real relationships run deeper. Brown, Remover notes, introduced them to a number of collaborators through the tracklist. ​“If you want to go back to what people are saying online, it’s that we’re all white and trans, but that’s too easy and it’s not even true,” they say. ​“Maybe we do have a little bit of that in common, that we’re gender non-conforming in some way, but I feel that’s more of a coincidence.” To them, the real throughline is sonic: ​“We all stem from digi-hardcore, EDM, future bass,” they say. ​“But each artist is distinct. The similarities drawn between us online are made up of preconceived notions by fans or haters.”

While these artists resist being read through the lens of identity politics, their work and collaboration with Brown still intersect with broader conversations about representation. All of the artists I spoke to recognise the stereotype forming around trans women as pioneers of leftfield, bleep-bloop electronica. From Wendy Carlos through to SOPHIE, there’s a long thread of trans artists gravitating toward the genre, maybe because it rewards transformation and self-invention. ​“We just really like the computer,” says Juno, half-jokingly at first, before expanding: ​“Inherently, when being trans, there’s a higher level of experimentation, not only with what you do, but your own identity.” Noelle nods: ​“Most trans women who make more pop-leaning electronic music would tell you their influences are some of the scariest and earliest outsider electronic music that exists. It’s just fun to take stuff like that and play with it.”

It’s tempting for some to overintellectualise what Brown is doing here, to flatten it into a discourse about white and trans musicians entering the orbit of a Black experimentalist, or about the internet’s flattening of genre hierarchies. But for everyone I speak to, the connection is less ideological than emotional.

Listening to Danny Brown now, 44 years old and ten albums deep, you hear someone still in love with discovery. He raps with the excitement of a kid who just opened FL Studio for the first time, looping samples with giddy disbelief. Now that wonder is contagious, spilling outward to the New Gen crowd. ​“All I wanted was to be a rapstar, didn’t know I could make it this far,” he raps on that euphoric final track. ​“I made it here against all odds, now I do it all for you.”