Through his tender songs, Kevin Abstract imagines love in all its shifting forms and flavors. Kevin Abstract--born Ian Simpson--started crafting his earliest songs as a child in Corpus Christi, Texas. He transformed a melting pot of influences into those first songs, performing at small local underground shows before finding a rabid online audience for his acclaimed 2014 debut MTV1987. His 2016 follow-up, American Boyfriend, is one of the quintessential records about young, queer love seen from the perspective of a Black kid in the South.
Kevin's real ascent, however, began with BROCKHAMPTON. Their story is internet music canon at this point: In the early 2010s, he assembled the group from real-life and internet besties who moved in together in South Los Angeles in 2016. They dropped three engrossing pop-rap albums and a handful of otherworldly videos in 2017, becoming gods to a sect of rap and indie music fans. Their next couple of eras netted them a number-one album in 2018 with iridescence, their most abrasive, defiant record--signaling, to some listeners, early tensions within the group--and a Billboard-charting hit in 2020's more charming "SUGAR." Kevin released a solo project during their nonstop run, 2019's warm Arizona Baby, which featured "Peach," his biggest song to date.
Following the band's announcement of their indefinite hiatus in 2022, Abstract quietly went back to work on his next solo effort. More than a decade after he first began exploring these feelings, the newly solo Kevin navigated the wonder and unease of ends and beginnings with his 2023 album Blanket. His first solo album in five years has the widescreen feel of past BROCKHAMPTON and Kevin Abstract records but finds Kevin probing life and love with newfound wonder. Although his sound continues to evolve considerably, his pursuit of truth through love remains.
