How Danny Brown keeps evolving, according to his ’Stardust’ collaborators

Danny Brown’s first exposure to Jane Remover’s music was one of baffled excitement. “What the fuck is this?” he recalled thinking in a recent podcast interview. When it was explained to him that it was a genre called dariacore, he was even more confused but also excited. “It blew my mind,” he said. “It’s futuristic as fuck.”

Jane is one in an army of boundary-pushing collaborators on Stardust, Brown’s anarchic and joyful tenth album. Joined by Underscores, Frost Children, Femtanyl, and IssBrokie, they were plucked by Brown from an underground scene that’s long defied categorization or genre names (nobody mention hyperpop). At a stage in his career when most rappers retreat into their comfort zones and begin catering to nostalgia, Brown is taking influence from the next generation and giving a group of young, often queer artists a platform bigger than the Discord servers on which they usually call home.

Brown has always straddled the line between mainstream and underground; his back catalog features collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Warp genius Rustie. But Stardust is as whole-hearted an embrace of underground culture ever taken by a relative outsider. It results in an album that delivers a mixture of an unc’s philosophy with a zoomer’s energy. Brown, fresh out of rehab, writes eloquently and positively about his newfound sobriety after years of addiction over beats that flash and whirr with chaotic swagger.

Ahead of the release of Stardust, The FADER gathered a collection of the album’s featured artists to discuss the album and what they took from their time working with Brown.

We made “Copycats” in a matter of hours. Danny was in the studio and was really inspired and wrote the whole thing there and then. His verse namechecks some of my older songs, which was really cool to hear.

I had been feeling a lot of imposter syndrome around that time. There had been a months-long spell where I felt like a covers artist, just making songs that sounded like other people, but there’s another way you could read it where it’s a comment on people copying me. I really wanted to make something that was fully original. When we made “Copycats” I hadn’t really made any headway on my next project. Seeing the song come out, though, and seeing it on Danny’s page has been really crazy. It still hasn’t hit yet that we’re about to go on tour together. It’s just a wild opportunity I didn’t ever expect I would ever get.

He’s super generous, even just seeing the way he’s talked about me and my friends stuff on his podcast. You can tell he really loves the music, there’s no ulterior motive. I almost started crying. I don’t really know many artists like him that are willing to just be so proud about the music they love on their platform. I think a lot of us try to be mysterious and lurk online. I think it’s cool that he’s shouting it from the rooftops.

“Flowers” is a really fun track. I would describe it as a positive prophecy and it was cool to share that with Danny. I’m an artist who’s just getting started and I think that he’s an artist who’s embarking on a new phase and a new moment, both personally and creatively.

“Flowers” plays with the phrase “getting your flowers” and the refrain is “I’m going to get more than my flowers,” which is about demanding and expecting more for yourself than surface level praise. It’s about wanting to really carve out your own place and own your artistry. I wrote the main part of the hook at home and sent it over to Danny and then he wrote his verse, which is this super fun, wordplay-heavy kind of thing. He really leaned into the flowers thing, which I love.

Danny has always sounded really cool over anything kind of EDM, I love his song [2013’s “25 Bucks”] with Purity Ring. His stuff is always so experimental so I think it makes sense that he is tapping in with this scene of left-of-centre electronic pop artists and sounds that are really visceral and on the extreme side of things, in terms of pop. It says a lot about the scene that Danny Brown has talked about finding inspiration from the music that we’re making. I find it very touching and also flattering because his taste is fantastic.

I first heard from Danny when I got a Hogwarts-style letter from a castle. And it said, “I want you to be part of my army of trans women on my album.” Not actually. He hit me up on Instagram with just, like, a heart. I was like, “He likes my shit. No way.” Then he said he wanted me on his album. It was a fever dream for sure. He was super accommodating and said, “Just do your thing.”

My verse on “Whatever The Case” is pure ignorance. And I was like, OK, I rap about being a Christian with a dick and looking like one of the white girls from a Tyler Perry movie. All this bullshit that spewed out of my brain. Danny didn’t ask me to change a thing.

Look at the Stardust tracklist, Danny Brown’s the only dude who would work with this many trans artists. But he knows ball. There isn’t a lot of trans art being circulated in the mainstream, especially not at the moment with everything going on politically. It makes me really happy that somebody like Danny is willing to put a megaphone on it.

The first time I met Danny was at Frost Fest in 2024. It was Frost Children’s festival and they played as the live band for his set, which was really fun. We hung out backstage. He’s a really eccentric character and an endless well of good anecdotes.

I went to Austin [Texas] to work on new music after we finished Stardust. It was a very chill vibe. He has a very suburban house and home life. There’s deer in the yard, they come up to the window and you can feed them. It’s a magical environment. You’ll be sitting on the couch listening to one of his crazy stories and then there’s a deer that just pops up in the window and it’s looking straight at you.

I remember Danny Brown dropping Old and it being a comment on the fact that he was in his 30s and how in rap that’s considered past it. Now he’s in his 40s and I think his sense of humor gives him a lot of grace moving forward. He approaches art and music in that philosophical, humorous way. And I think if you take yourself too seriously, you can get really lost in your head.

I think being curious means that you can stay timeless because you have got that natural curiosity and you’re not pushing new ideas away. It’s super inspiring to me as someone who’s about to have a baby and drop a new album myself [Long Live the Old Dead Gods] at the same time. He shows how you can keep a naive interest and passion going. That openness to the world means you can transcend age. Any good artist should be taking all manner of lessons as the years tick by and then you share that wisdom through your art.