Snotty Nose Rez Kids give listeners some pandemic relief with ‘I’m Good, HBU?’

Boy, are these guys prolific.

It’s been a little over a year since Snotty Nose Rez Kids dropped their Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted “Life After” and now the Vancouver-based rap duo of Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce are back already with “I’m Good, HBU?”

The new eight-track album serves as both a sequel and a stopgap.

“This is just to give people a little taste of our music, a little relief, a little something just to hold them over,” Nyce said during a phone call last week. “We wanted to focus on our craft as rappers and making top-notch music in our opinion.”

Nyce said the album’s tone and cover — which portrays the two principals relaxing in a sunny backyard, watering a lawn — are meant to offer a lighter mood after the shared downer of our collective COVID-19 experiences.

“This was born from what ‘Life After’ turned into,” Nyce said. “It’s more about the experiences of coming out of the pandemic and what those experiences were for us. With this album, we realized how fragile life can be, and how fragile our careers are and how there’s no promise of tomorrow. It makes you realize that you shouldn’t take anything for granted.

“For us, it was all about, ‘I’m good, how are you doing? I hope the rest of you guys are doing good, too,’ after all that bulls– we went through.”

But it’s not all smiles and good vibes for Snotty Nose Rez Kids, who perform a makeup date and the final show of their “Life After” tour at the Velvet Underground on Dec. 10.

“I feel like we’re a lot of fun, and we like to bring people’s energy up and make people feel good about themselves but, at the end of the day, we are a very serious group at the same time and the stuff that we talk about is always going to reflect that,” Nyce said.

“You can’t separate politics from us or talking about identity. That stuff will always come out in our art.”

A case in point is the “I’m Good, HBU” song “Hot Planet” and you can probably guess what that one’s about.

“It’s about climate change,” said Metz. “It’s about us f–ing up the planet. But at the same time, we’re paralleling it with our careers and how we’re hot at the same time. It’s a negative and a positive.”

Snotty Nose Rez Kids have been on fire of late, completing a lengthy U.S. tour earlier this year and Metz said they’re grateful for the public support, despite audiences being slow to show up early on due to pandemic apprehension.

“There was still that fear of COVID, so that was the only discouraging part at the beginning. But we’ve been touring steady since late last October and there’s such a mad, drastic difference compared from October 2021 to November 2022.

“Now there’s not that sense of fear in the air anymore and everybody’s just more than down to get together and burn nights like that. I feel like we really picked up where we left off, which is like a super huge blessing, because not everybody can say that.”

Nyce said the duo even received some surprisingly pleasant news from their booking agents, the Feldman Agency, which represents Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies, John Fogerty and Michael Bublé on their international roster.

“They told us we were the top booked artist of their entire roster over this last year,” Nyce said. “We played over 90 shows this year. We’ve been steadily booked and the phone’s always ringing. We’ve been barely home.

“For us, we’re really blessed to be able to do what we’re doing, because a lot of artists aren’t doing what we’re doing right now.”

They’re also bolstered by major award show performances last spring and summer: a memorable turn on the Budweiser Stage at the Juno Awards when they teamed up with DJ Shub and played a medley of “War Club” and “Uncle Rico” while surrounded by hoop dancers; and an appearance at the SOCAN Awards in October, where they shared the first Vince Fontaine Indigenous Song Award with Calgary rapper Drezus.

The duo also won three Western Canadian Music Awards in the summer, while “Life After” became their third album to be shortlisted for the Polaris Prize.

“Mainly because we were put in front of so many (music) industry people, I felt the shift this year right after the SOCAN Awards in Toronto: we got a bunch of calls from different people,” Nyce said.

“That really helped us get traction with people in the industry who are doing different things, people who can place your name in the right hands.”

Metz wishes dancers and percussionists could be part of a regular Snotty Nose Rez Kids experience, but “it just is not in the budget right now.”

However, that could change, as the team is holding talks with a major label (rumoured to be Sony) and working on an album project they consider to be their best ever.

“We’ve been working on the concept of it and the idea, and the sound and the producers for the last four years,” Nyce said, suggesting a probable fall 2023 release.

“It’s in full work right now and that’s our No. 1 priority. I think it’s going to be our greatest album to date.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Snotty Nose Rez Kids interview if the duo wasn’t asked about Indigenous issues, including their thoughts on a rare apology issued in August by Pope Francis for the Catholic Church’s role in child abuse and attempted cultural genocide at Canadian residential schools between 1870 and 1996.

Nyce thought it was disingenuous, a PR ploy, though he stressed that’s his individual opinion.

“It’s stuff that we knew was going to come up eventually and we knew that things were going to come out of the woodwork, and that this would eventually happen,” he said. “It’s also publicity. Who really knows what they think? Who knows what the right thing to do is in these situations?

“For me, it didn’t really mean a whole lot,” Nyce continued. “But I can’t speak for everybody. It might have meant something for some people. Different survivors have different things they’re going through and I can’t really speak for everybody but, for me, it was just — it’s all an act, you know? It’s going through the motions and doing what your public tells you to do in those situations.

“It’s cancel culture and puritans are on it.”

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