At the apex of New York’s first heatwave of the summer, hundreds of tapped-in alternative hip-hop heads in their teens and 20s descend on a barely ventilated indoor skatepark in East Williamsburg. The line stretches around the block, and when security finally starts letting people in, the crowd throngs to the back of the venue. The first waves fill every last square inch of the half pipe where the show will take place. Dozens more spill in behind, squeezing into the adjacent the concrete area.
Hosted by No Bells, the event is a celebration of A Dog’s Chance, the irresistible debut collaborative album from POLO PERKS 3 3 3, FearDorian, and AyooLii. It’s an all-ages affair, so water is the main beverage on hand, and the blog’s proprietors dart around the room handing out bottles of the stuff to ensure mass hydration.
“It was a million degrees,” Polo remembers days later between sips from a comically large bottle of Martinelli’s apple juice. “It felt like we were in hell, bro,” Dorian adds. The 18-year-old mastermind producer of A Dog’s Chance is wedged between Polo (29) and Lii (21) on a leather sofa in The FADER’s office, his slight frame and bleached hair in stark relief against his two much-larger associates. “I didn’t even know we were doing it at a skatepark — I be so out of the loop sometimes,” Lii says, looking up from the two phones he’s holding (one in each hand). “Seeing that shit, I was like, ‘Goddamn.’ I wasn’t even expecting 100 people to pull up.”
Left: quinn. Right: Baby Osama. Phots by Patrick Okun.
The show starts much later than billed, as DIY skatepark shows tend to do. Seattle MC cr1tter and ascendant Bronx native Baby Osama kick the party into a delirium that’s taken to another level by quinn; the DMV shapeshifter conducts the crowd into a moshing frenzy, a many-headed beast that shouts her lyrics bar for bar, wrestling the PA system for primacy.
By the time Polo, Dorian, and Lii take over, every last human in the building is drenched and keyed up, pushing and shoving in front of the triumvirate like a sugar-high amoeba. They open their set with the rambunctious, M.I.A.-flipping “PaperPlanesSoulja,” followed by the extremely silly, Israel Kamakawiw’ole-jacking “Rainbow,” sounding every bit as locked in as they do on tape.
The collective energy of Polo, Lii, and Dorian during our interview — off the cuff, playful, humble to an extent but also constantly gassing each other up — mirrors their mind meld on A Dog’s Chance and their electric stage presence at the skatepark show. The album’s title is an alternate idiom for a one-in-a-million shot, reflecting a record that sprouted from the type of hybrid online/IRL miracle that only makes sense in a post-pandemic context.
All three artists found each other on the internet: Dorian has been a fan of Polo since the late 2010s, when he began to gather clout as a core member of Surf Gang; Polo was acquainted with Dorian’s work around the same time, while the younger artist was going viral as a dancer on the TikTok precursor Triller. Their first in-person meeting almost happened in 2020, when Dorian tried to attend an ill-advised COVID show Polo was playing in Atlanta.
“I was probably like 13, pulling up to that,” Dorian remembers. “My mom drove me, and we were looking for it for a minute; we just couldn’t find the place. When we finally got there, she was like, ’Nah, we’re going home.’”
“It wasn’t in the woods — it was in the trenches,” Polo clarifies, shaking his head, when I ask why the venue was so hard to find. “That was a dangerous show.”
“One of my purposes in making music is to be a bridge between everything and everyone I’m interested in.”
Polo and Dorian finally met in 2022 when, by cosmic coincidence, Polo moved in 15 minutes down the street from Dorian in the deep Atlanta suburbs. He’d left his native Brooklyn, in part, to remove himself from the BedStuy blocks where he came of age, another zone he calls “the trenches.” Down south, he’s enjoyed a new level of financial freedom that’s allowed him to buy his own house, distance himself from New York’s constant clout chase and the pressures of a label contract, make music for fun again.
“I ended up just sliding up to his crib, and we started working literally every day,” Dorian says. The Dog’s Chance sessions began shortly thereafter.
Photos by Peter Gonzales.
“It wasn’t in the woods — it was in the trenches.”
Notwithstanding the recent revelation of FearDorian the rapper — on his self-titled debut solo album earlier this year, and on several Dog’s Chance tracks — Dorian is a producer to the core. In just his first few active years, he’s offered his prodigious talents to countless digital rap darlings; his collaborators have ranged from d0llywood1 to Duwap Kaine, dazegxd to xaviersobased, and midwxst to Moh Baretta.
Even beyond his seemingly boundless beatmaking capacities, he’s a producer in the classical sense: connecting disparate sectors of his now-vast network, cross-pollinating the scenes he wants to see in the world, and, in the most general sense, making shit happen. “One of my purposes in making music is to be a bridge between everything and everyone I’m interested in,” he says.
“Dorian showed me how many amazing artists have connections to me or were influenced by me,” Polo adds. “When he put me on to quinn, I was like, ‘There’s not gonna be music like this for 40 years. And this person likes my music? Are you sure?’”
Polo speaks with the same incredulous enthusiasm about some of the samples he and Dorian were able to clear with their original creators — the Teen Suicide clip they flipped for “Ricky Eats Acid” and the Current Joys cut they used in “Rockband Tees 08 Denims,” for instance (“Current Joys fucks with me?!” he recalls shouting into the phone when Dorian shared the news).
Dorian and Polo’s mutual appreciation for moody music from the late aughts and early ’10s led to some of the best tracks on A Dog’s Chance, but others came from source material they didn’t initially see eye to eye on. Take “Rainbow,” whose central sample rivals “Paper Planes” for the most unmissable Easter egg on the album:
“I was like, ‘Don’t make me do this, bro,’” Dorian says. “I’m like, ‘You’re doing it,” Polo interjects. “It was one of those beats that gave him an aneurysm to make. I had to be over his shoulder, like, ‘You’re not leaving the room.’”
“It really takes him rapping on it for me to see the vision sometimes,” Dorian continues. “Sometimes I be buggin’ a little, but it always comes out fire in the end.”
If Dorian has found a mentor and champion in Polo, Polo has found in Dorian something far more than an acolyte. “He’s smart as hell and so educated on music — more educated than anybody in his time frame,” Polo says, beaming like a proud older brother.
Dorian is always open to trying Polo’s bold and eccentric sample ideas, Polo says, more so than even the most forward-thinking producers he’s worked with in the past. Without fear of reflexive pushback, Polo has developed a deep trust in Dorian, and a comfort in knowing he’s got a producer who will push his ideas to their fullest potential and beyond.
“It was on some whatever-we-feel-like-type shit.”
The Polo-AyooLii linkup was another of Dorian’s inspired connections. Dorian produces like he’s from 10 different cities, always touching base with local artists to make sure he’s approaching their sound with proper respect before applying his signature touches. Lately, he’s been obsessed with the handclap-driven Milwaukee lowend sound, arising from an explosive scene that’s caused tremors outside the region thanks to the likes of Chicken P, J.P., Myaap, Maz G, Certified Trapper, and Lii — a punchline machine who has quickly become a lightning rod for his city.
“I met Lii because…” Dorian starts. “’Cause I was going crazy,” Lii finishes, flashing a goofy smile containing a full set of gold grills. Their first track together, “Andele,” was featured on Lii’s EP Bam Different, as was another song simply titled “FearDorian” (not to be confused with the separate Lii X Dorian joint “Happy Birthday FearDorian,” released last June to celebrate Dorian’s 17th).
After several flubbed connections due to miscommunication and bad timing, Polo recalls hitting up all of his and Lii’s Instagram mutuals while waiting on his verse for “Ricky Eats Acid,” only to find out Lii had been locked up; Lii recorded the verse two days after his release, and the finished song went on to be A Dog’s Chance’s lead single.
The lion’s share of Lii’s contributions to the album — he appears on nine of the project’s 16 tracks — were recorded in a single week at Polo’s house. The creative process took on a fever dream quality during this time, revolving around each artist’s distinct proclivities and sleep cycles. “I don’t think me and Polo ever did sessions where we were both like, ‘I’m finna do this right now,’” Lii remembers. “It was more like, ‘He’s in the mode, I’m sleepy as fuck, so he’ll go knock it out and then I’ll wake up and do my thing.’ It was on some whenever-we-feel-like-it-type shit.”
The sole exception to this approach, Polo clarifies, is “PaperPlanesSoulja,” one of only four songs in which Polo and Lii share the spotlight. “I think he was smoking a blunt on the balcony, and when he came back, I was like, ‘Bro, get on this,’ Polo remembers. “He didn’t even hear the beat or nothing. He was just like, ‘Yeah, aight.’”
The crowd at Substance Skatepark. Photos by Patrick Okun.
Polo, Lii, and Dorian end their skatepark set the only way that makes sense: racing through “Ricky Eats Acid” and then running it back, stepping into the crowd the second time around to join the mosh. Outside the venue afterward, the consensus is indisputable: Events that draw crowds as simultaneously online, diverse (in age, gender, race, and style), and enthusiastic as the show we’ve just witnessed are one in a million.
Even as the summer heat encroaches on The FADER’s office the following week and tech difficulties cause the interview to drag, Dorian, Polo, and Lii still seem to be enjoying each other’s company — sharing inside jokes, cracking up to videos on Lii’s phones, playfully shit-talking XXL‘s newly released freshman class (but paying respect to Cash Cobain).
When I ask, prompted by their publicist, if they’re working on A Dog’s Chance’s sequel, they snap into a choreographed gag they’ve now repeated in several interviews: “Fuck no,” Dorian and Lii reply, almost in unison. “We’re all falling out after this PR run,” Polo adds automatically. “We’re beefing.”
Other than this brief, harmless moment of feigned animosity, though, nothing about their chaotic, carefree routine seems rehearsed or contrived. They’re simply three ultra-talented artists, having the time of their lives.
