First, the name. MAVERICK was an apartment — the old building near the UW campus where I lived with Othree and SJ. It was falling apart and we loved it: house parties, good memories, and the place we started making music together. When the building got slated for reconstruction we had to move out, and we kept telling ourselves we need a new maverick (that’s where our Instagram, @neednewmaverick, comes from). Then it clicked: wherever the three of us are, that’s MAVERICK. We didn’t need an address to identify us. We make music with the people who come through our home — that’s how ANTHONY KIM ended up in the group too. Honestly, he was too good at rapping to let leave.
This album was made in the military. You can’t bring a laptop into the Korean army, so when our beatmaker Koreandy sent us a batch of beats that sounded popular and familiar, we recorded every guide vocal on Voloco — a mobile app with terrible quality but working autotune. That was the entire studio. We wrote from instinct and from memory: trying to put as much of the MAVERICK apartment days into the songs as we could, plus each member’s love stories.
- DDUK — the title track, about the shallow love of rappers.
- Countin’ guap — us imagining the money coming in.
- I’m a famous korean rapper — our shallow rapper love stories.
- AMLID (All My Love Is Dead) — inspired by Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3”.
Right after discharge we rented a small studio near Hongdae and recorded it for real, then mastered with 821 Sound — the top mastering studio in Korea. The engineer told us famous rappers once sat exactly where we were sitting, bringing in their first songs. Then he gave us the most practical advice in the world: keep a realistic job, do the music on the side, let it become primary later. Inspiring and grounding in the same sentence.