Lil Tecca on Dopamine and being “the face of the factory”

The title of Lil Tecca’s fifth studio album DOPAMINE traces back to the Long Island rapper’s childhood. “Ever since a kid, I’ve always been into neurotransmitters,” he says from the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment. “I’d be showing my mom videos about people doing certain substances and why it affects them that way, what neurotransmitter is working to get them to achieve this feeling.”

I’m struck by this remarkable precociousness, even as an avid teenage reader of the psychoactive substance wiki Erowid; then again, growing up faster than most has defined Lil Tecca’s career, from early days on SoundCloud to mainstream success alongside his label Galactic (partnered with Republic). Falling down a YouTube rabbithole about monoamines and peptides seems blasé compared to charting on Billboard while you’re still in high school.

Of the various molecules floating around our synaptic pathways, dopamine feels like a fitting mascot for our hyperstimulated times. Dopamine is responsible for motivation and satisfaction, but also that quick jolt of pleasure when you watch brainrot Tiktoks, enjoy a super sugary coffee, or take a hit off a joint (Tecca tells me he’ll be doing so right after our call). But DOPAMINE the album is Tecca’s attempt to master the cycle, rather than break it.

“Dopamine addiction is something we all deal with: scrolling, eating foods we like a little too much, different activities different people are into,” Lil Tecca says. “Finding a way to be both the yin and the yang makes it worth it to have your vices.”

Chasing that balance, DOPAMINE alternately urges listeners to chase their dreams with discipline and turn up with abandon, sometimes even on the same song. “We’re not all saints,” Tecca grins. “And I like to embrace both sides of myself.”

Tecca is already more than half a decade out from “Ransom,” the 2019 smash that blew up when he was just 17. His craft has only grown with each subsequent release, and he’s well aware. “We Love You Tecca, Virgo World, and We Love You Tecca 2 are this adolescent version of me,” Tecca reflects. “Then TEC and PLAN A is this big jump of growth: ‘Okay, he’s really figuring it out, he’s taking his craft seriously.’ [Now] DOPAMINE is me taking everything that I learned and just putting it into one album.”

Accordingly, DOPAMINE is the most poised and polished Tecca has ever been on record, fusing his love of Speaker Knockerz and Chief Keef with the coked-out neon synths of 80’s pop (“It was 100% inspired by the [Grand Theft Auto] Vice City soundtrack, especially Flash FM and Fever 105”). So the celestial arpeggios of “The Truth” collapse into the radio-ready groove of “Favorite Lie,” which would fit perfectly between INXS and Pat Benatar even with its Lil Keed namedrop; a silky piano line elegantly threads through level-headed kiss-off “LYK” just two tracks before “One Night” explodes in a riot of EDM-indebted synths that whistle, streak, and detonate like a bundle of fireworks.

It’s also his most danceable album to date, folding together sounds spanning Afrobeats (“Don’t Rush”), rage (“Tic Tac Toe”), Neptunes-type-beats (lead single “Dark Thoughts” and the record’s best song, “Irish Goodbye”), and beyond. It’s purposely less cohesive than Tecca’s last two albums, prioritizing stylistic and emotional range over all else.

“This isn’t just an album,” Tecca tells me. “This is the soundtrack to your life, if you’ll let it be.”

Recording for DOPAMINE began eight months ago following the release of PLAN A, though Tecca’s team was sourcing beats via Discord as recently as a couple weeks ago. He tells me the first couple months of recording were looser, and that the record started to come into focus six months ago when he nailed down the name. “Before you have the album title, you’re in a routine just trying to get your workflow right. It’s like being in the gym just trying to up your weight,” Tecca explains. “I feel like the album process starts really heavy once the album name is figured out.”

Tecca strikes me as a meticulous creative, regimented about his craft in a way few rappers of any age are. “It’s a very focused process. We have all the vibes that we want to capture and we just check them off slowly and we don’t go back to [songs when they’re done],” he says. “We have a structured approach on how we want to take our left turns, but we also do leave gray area to let the magic happen naturally.”

DOPAMINE is in some ways a product of the pleasure-seeking epidemic. Tecca tells me he hates long records — “no one’s going to listen to an hour thirty minute album” — but he sees 16 tracks as “the sweet spot of capturing attention” and giving his fans enough music to tide them over for a full year. When I ask about how he approaches fitting so many musical ideas into shorter length LPs, he compares his songs to an amusement park — where flashy stimulation and quick thrills are always just around the corner.

“Production-wise we’re doing so many different things sonically, a very long song doesn’t do justice for what we’re trying to achieve. We like to curate albums in a rollercoaster sense.”

“Once the mission is accomplished, it’s on to the next,” Tecca says of his longstanding creative partnership with Internet Money producers Taz Taylor and Rio Levya. “We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to impress ourselves. We’re trying to figure out the next sound that people didn’t even know we could do.”

These lofty ambitions are supported by a village, from creative director Gualo Hawes to a plethora of producers, videographers and designers, and Tecca is eager to make sure they all get their due.

“The people that make my beats are 100 times better at making beats than me. Sometimes I start little things that I got in my mind [but] for the most part, I just got really good producers around me that can hear my vision and achieve it. For example, “OWA OWA,” I beatboxed that beat [for Rio] and it came out sounded exactly like how I beatboxed it.”

“There’s no part of the process that I do by myself,” Tecca tells me. “All I am is just the face of the factory. Everything you see Lil Tecca do, there’s a bunch of people behind me making sure the job gets done.”

Still, as you might expect for a producer turned rapper (or a Virgo), Tecca prefers to work on songs by himself. “DOPAMINE was 95% recorded on this mic right here in this room,” he says. When I ask why, given his resources, he doesn’t work in a studio, he shrugs.
“I don’t need any extra energy around me to create. It makes my process slower. Every time I have to tell someone, ‘run it back,’that could be me saying a line.”

The approach has yielded Tecca’s self-professed “most personal” album to date, even if he’ll freely admit, “there’s not much things I have to confess about.” DOPAMINE paints emotions in broad strokes, less interested in autobiographical detail than evocative moodsetting, but Tecca’s grown more transparent about the heartache and messy relationships beneath the diamonds and Balenciaga.

“When other people are in the room, there’s certain things that you might not say, certain ways you might not say it,” he says. “This is the only album personally of mine that I listen to and it feels cinematic” (He’s a fan of Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels and Chungking Express).

That sense of satisfaction might be why Lil Tecca seems almost unconcerned with the album’s reception for now: “Before I would definitely say I gauged success off of results instead of the actual journey of completing the vision,” he muses. “But now I would say success is an umbrella term for multifaceted things like: Were you happy [during] the whole process? Did you actually get to express your sadness if you did get sad? Did you express your vision fully? Did you make sure everyone around you also played a part in that vision?

“I’m not a yes man for no one in my life. So I don’t expect the world to be a yes man for me,” Tecca says. “Everyone don’t like chicken — everyone’s not going to like me.”