The title of Powfu’s debut full-length album reads like a cry for help coming from inside pop music’s most exclusive VIP room. That’s where the British Columbia artist (né Isaiah Faber) found himself in 2020 after crafting the definitive slack-rap jam of the pandemic, “death bed (coffee for your head)”, a bleary-eyed anthem that catapulted him into the billion-stream club. That sudden success threatened to thrust the bedroom beatmaker out of his natural environment and into a place where he was, as his record puts it, surrounded by hounds and serpents. “When you start getting more famous, a lot more snakes start popping up—you realise there’s a lot of people that want to be friends just because you have money,” Powfu tells Apple Music. “That’s a big reason I didn’t move to LA—a lot of people out there are just constantly trying to hustle you. I like staying out in the forest up in Canada. There’s more privacy, and I can do more of what I want to do by myself.” As Powfu tells it, the only thing that really separates his first proper album from his previous EPs is the greater number of songs. “I always try to keep the same lo-fi vibe to all my releases,” he says. “Most of my fans became fans because of the chill, sad stuff, so I want to keep those people intrigued.” But while the record mostly sticks to his signature sonic palette, surrounded also charts Powfu’s continued growth as an artist and a (now-married) young adult. Though he still gets a lot of mileage from revisiting the eternally fraught emotional terrain of high-school heartbreak, his songwriting is also imbued with deeper expressions of love and faith. And where his childhood love of pop punk has traditionally formed the melodic foundation of his emo-trap tracks, this time out, he makes a more concerted play for the mosh pit. Here, Powfu provides a track-by-track guide to his ongoing evolution. “shade of blue” [Powfu, Rxseboy, tia tia & Shalfi] “I was going through TikTok maybe a year ago, and I came across the guitar loop on there—this guy was just shredding, and I was like, ‘Dang, that sounds crazy!’ I wanted to make a beat out of it, so I sent it to [producer] Sarcastic Sounds, and he added drums to it. I was having a hard time coming up with a melody I liked, so we sent the track to Tia Scola—her artist name is tia tia—and she put the hook melody on it, and that inspired me to write a rap on it. At first, I was kind of freestyling. Like, the line about growing up in a small town and going to the movie theatre—that was my favourite thing to do as a kid because in the place I grew up in, that movie theatre was all we had. But then the song became more about a relationship turning sour and trying to get through it. I showed it to Rxseboy, and he wanted to make a second verse, so the song was like a collab of all of us together.” “washing off the blood” “This is the craziest one on the album, in terms of lyrical content. I made the beat myself, and it gave me this image of running away. It’s kind of about the end of the world—the government has turned corrupt, and I’m just trying to protect my family and get away. It kind of matches the title of the album—everybody’s coming after me, and I’m just trying to protect the people I love, as well as asking for forgiveness for the sins I’ve done in my past.” “keepsafe”[Powfu & Laeland] “I think I wrote it in, like, 10 minutes. I was probably just having a sad day and wanted to get some emotions out.” “broke my habits” “I’m talking about getting in a relationship where I liked the girl so much that she’s kind of changing me, and I’m able to get over my bad habits in my past because I love her so much, and I’ll do anything for her.” “watch me miss” [Powfu & Jomie] “In high school, I would never flirt with girls or ask them out—I was always super shy, and I was always so scared about heartbreak. At the same time, when I started making music in Grade 12, I didn’t want to show it to anybody because I was scared that people would make fun of me. So, in this song, I’m saying I want to take my shots and try these things, but at the same time, I’m too scared about the outcome, so I just don’t do it most of the time.” “butterfly rumors” “I just loved the beat on this song so much, I wanted to make the lyrics just flow nice and be super chill and relatable. It’s basically just about loving this girl, but she’s not committing to you. You’ll see her hanging out with other guys, and you get overprotective and kind of jealous, and you’re kind of wishing that you weren’t in love with her because she’s troublesome.” “Mine” “That is kind of the oddball on the album—it’s probably the most upbeat, punk-sounding one. I was just driving on the highway one day, listening to some old Taylor Swift, and ‘Mine’ came on, and I was like, ‘This sounds like a country person singing a punk song.’ So, I thought, ‘I gotta re-record this in my punk voice and have some hardcore drums.’ I recorded it with my dad, and it came out pretty cool.” “i hate waking up” (feat. Rxseboy, SadBoyProlific & Alek Olsen) “For a while there, waking up was really hard for me because it felt like I was just doing the same thing every day: I’d wake up, and then all I had to do was make music. There would be times where I wasn’t feeling motivated at all, and then I’d sleep in and feel even more unmotivated because I just wasted half my day. I showed the track to SadBoyProlific and Rxseboy, and they put awesome verses on it that match the vibe completely.” “desiree” [Powfu & Lil Skele] “My wife’s middle name is Desiree, and she always wanted a song to be titled her name, and I thought, ‘What better artist to do it than myself?’ Her first name is actually Natasha, and I call her Tashi as a nickname, but I felt like Desiree just sounds nicer melodically. I’m just talking about taking care of my wife and being there for her. And then I got Lil Skele on there for a feature—that’s one of my wife’s favourite artists as well as mine, and I felt like his voice would just go really well with the beat, so I sent it over to him and he killed it.”