Tyler The Creator played a major role in helping Rex Orange County get his career off the ground and the rapper even appears on Rex’s new album, Who Cares?, which was released today. Rex is also the subject of a new NME cover story, in which he discusses the impact Tyler has had on him.
He reminisced about what it was like meeting with Tyler in Los Angeles early on in his career and a lesson Tyler taught him, saying:
“It was just opening my eyes to a different world that I just couldn’t possibly understand from a bedroom in the countryside in the UK. I remember that The Game rolled up to the studio in a Red Rolls Royce! It just felt like a different world. […] I had 500 followers on SoundCloud at the time when I headed out to LA and nobody really knew who I was. It made me realize that if I have to believe in myself, then someone like Tyler will believe in me, too. He’s taught me a lot, but also just him giving me a mirror to look at what I did — that I had made it out there and done it on my own.”
He also discussed how he was affected by the pandemic, saying, “I was mentally prepared to be on tour and away for a whole year, and then came back to my parents’ house in the countryside… it was like, ‘What now?’ I’d look at the schedule and see certain places I was excited to go to like Australia, South America, Mexico, Asia, New Zealand and then it was… Surrey. It was just mentally a bit confusing.”
Read the full feature here.
Who Cares? is out now via Sony Music. Get it here.