In 2022, 20-year-old aspiring rapper and university student ThxSoMch was listening to a Baby Keem type beat on the toilet when something in YouTube’s suggested section caught his eye. “It looked super different to anything I’d ever clicked on, I’d never even heard the word post-punk before,” he explains. That night, ThxSoMch recorded a hook to the instrumental in his bedroom and posted it on TikTok – a simple decision which would not only change his life, but also that of anonymous YouTube producer Grayskies thousands of miles away in São Paulo, Brazil.

They were an unlikely duo. ThxSoMch was a self-described die-hard Yeat and Playboi Carti fan raised in Toronto, Canada, and Grayskies was a Brazilian high school student obsessed with shoegaze and punk. Neither knew anything about the other’s genre, or even spoke the same language, but it was precisely this cross-pollinating collaboration that made the track stand out. Released in December 2022 as “Spit In My Face”, the addictive single blended the driving, fast-paced kick drums of Molchat Doma’s apocalyptic post-punk with the exaggerated lyricism of the rage rap scene and now stands at over 700 million streams.

“When ThxSoMch decided to freestyle on my beat it changed my life, it’s crazy how these little events shape things,” Grayskies tells Dazed, speaking on a video call with ThxSoMch for his first ever recorded interview. “When I made my beats, I heard more of a singing approach, but ThxSoMch blew that out of the water. He threw bars in and was energetic, it wasn’t something that was easily forgotten.”

Working remotely over the internet, the distant duo released a number of emo rap hits in the subsequent months, but it wasn’t until 2024 that ThxSoMch decided to visit Grayskies in São Paulo to record in-person. Despite the billion-plus streams they’d accumulated, the visit marked both of their first times recording outside of their respective bedrooms, and they were nervous. “I had a full-blown panic attack, it was hard to breathe and I forgot how to speak English,” recalls Grayskies. “But, when ThxSoMch came I realised there was no need to be so anxious, it was hella fun trying new shit in the studio and a lot of good music came from it.”

They quickly realised they had more in common than they first thought. Both were misfits who had gravitated to the internet in order to express themselves, opposing traditional pop sensibilities and finding catharsis in darker soundscapes. ThxSoMch’s initial trip was only meant to last a couple of weeks, but he eventually stayed in Brazil for a total of six months, working on his debut album, The Sound of You Laughing, released today, together with Grayskies. “I’m way more confident now than when I was going into the project,” ThxSoMch reflects. “It’s like, damn, I feel like an actual artist now.”

A far cry from the TikTok snippets and static ‘type beat’ production ThxSoMch launched his career with, the new project is strikingly cohesive. It listens like a slow descent into madness, with ThxSoMch going from making his significant other laugh in the Flawed Mangoes-assisted single “Sound of you Laughing” to realising he has become the butt of others jokes in the sludgy and distorted closing track  “Aim for the Bushes”. It’s tied together by the emotive kick patterns and visceral vocals that made “Spit In My Face” a viral sensation, but what really makes the project special is the unlikely friendship that ThxSoMch and Grayskies have uncovered along the way. Separated by language and distance, it was a single YouTube type beat that drew these two kindred spirits together, and they have since captivated misfits around the globe.

Below, Canadian vocalist ThxSoMch and Brazilian producer Grayskies go head-to-head on the unlikely resonance that underpins their collaborative debut album The Sound Of You Laughing.

Do you remember what you thought when you first heard each other?

ThxSoMch: I just fell in love like when I made ‘Spit in My Face’. I feel bad saying this, but nobody fucking does it like Grayskies. His shit’s actually incredible. The part that still blows my mind is that, every single one of his beats, I’ve never listened to music that sounds more like me and where I’m from. I’d just be driving around the suburbs of Canada and I’m like, ‘This feels like exactly whereI I’m from’. But it couldn’t have been made in a more polar opposite place. Even if you look at Grayskies’ thumbnails that he uses in his YouTube videos, it literally looks like where I live.

Grayskies: I was like, ‘This is hella different.’ I first listened to ‘Spit In My Face’ was when I it had already kind of blown up on TikTok. Greg, my manager, reached out and was like, ‘Yo, there’s this song with your beat that people are listening to a lot and we need to clear it for the artist to release it’.

ThxSoMch: On my side, it was blowing up and I was waking up every day sick to my stomach. I was nervous because it was a lot of pressure. I remember calling my other manager Tommy and he’s like, ‘OK, first thing do you have the rights to the beat?’ And I was like, ‘What’s that mean?’ I was literally figuring out actual music industry terms. On both of our sides it was just craziness and confusion.

Grayskies: We didn’t understand how things worked.

Grayskies is a funny name for someone who’s spent their entire life in Brazil, no?

Grayskies: Some parts of Brazil have this sunny image, but I lived in the San Bernardo do Campo region of São Paulo and I don’t see it as super sunny. But, yeah I like the Grayskies name because I’ve always made music that felt more gloomy, you know?

Also, sonically, it reflects the outside influence, like Molchat Doma and Dive. In Brazil, the stuff that’s on televisions a lot of the time is North American, you know? Christmas movies come from North America and, even though we don’t experience it, I grew up seeing movies where there’s snowmen being made on the sidewalks and shit. Like, what do you call it? The fireplace? In Brazil, Christmas is summer, but all that becomes an unavoidable part of our imagination. I guess it spills into the music, too.

The album feels like a spiral downwards. How was the process of making it?

ThxSoMch: So, the way it ended up, in terms of starting in one place and ending in another, only came about at the end. We’d basically just try to make the best songs we could each trip and we knew that it would be cohesive because it’s our sound. The whole time while we were making the album, we’d be like, ‘Oh, we need to make something darker.’ Looking back, the album flows from brighter to darker as it goes.

Most of it was just Grayskies riffing on the guitar and coming up with something super cool, and then I’d either come up with a terrible idea and we’d move on or… We had like 2,000 voice recordings of him playing the guitar, me singing over it, and the best ones we’d build upon.

How did the Flawed Mangoes collaboration come about?

ThxSoMch: Over a year ago, Flawed Mangoes sent my team a bunch of his music and said feel free to sample any of it. I sent the pack to my friend that I also make music with named LMG and he laid drums down and I just freestyled over it, sitting on the couch off a couple edibles and all the lyrics came at once. Two days later, I recorded the song. Then, when I went to Brazil I played a bunch of songs for Grayskies that I already had and he liked that one.

Grayskies helped me restructure it into the song that it is now. Flawed Mangoes added some more stuff too – a really cool guitar line that sounds like a synth in the last chorus. Yeah, that one is a collab between me, LMG, Flawed Mangoes and Grayskies. It kind of just came about online like everything else.

So, where did this central theme of laughter come from?

ThxSoMch: The title track ‘Sound Of You Laughing’ is a love song. But, then one of the trips I couldn’t sleep because there was a fucking drill on the other side of my head in the hotel at like 9:00 a.m. I go down to the front desk and be like, ‘Yo, can you guys please stop drilling into the wall?’ And the guy would laugh at me and couldn’t speak English and I’d be like, ‘Fuck!’ I was freaking out. That’s ‘Bad Dream’.

I’m insecure. There’s insecurities in these songs. There’s still a fear of mine of being laughed at, but I’m also always trying to make other people laugh because I’m insecure. So. that’s the duality of the name.

The Sound Of You Laughing is out now.