Thai rapper S4EED’s eyes light up at the suggestion of shooting photos in an abandoned traffic booth full of broken glass. “Yes!” he yelps. “Take us somewhere all smashed up!” This could certainly describe his overall aesthetic; a dark, emo vibe full of scuffed-up sounds and visuals, all veering toward a finale of total destruction. There’s too much traffic to get to the booth, but there’s plenty of fake blood on hand to keep the vibe angsty.
S4EED—whose name means happy in Arabic, with the number four referencing Buddhist teaching of The Four Noble Truths relating to suffering—has been releasing prolific music for several years, building a small but loyal fan base on SoundCloud while eschewing the tastes of the Thai mainstream. “I can’t do what other people want, I’m scared to lose myself and my attitude,” the 24-year-old explains. “I used to work at a production house but they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?!'” His music deftly avoids getting pinned down by any genre, floating through anything that fits his mood, picking up inspiration from industrial and hardcore, ambient sounds and electro, and even slipping into dance floor vibes like techno and hardstyle.
He used to play the guitar and took some serious lessons as a teenager, but near the end of high school he ditched the bands and switched over to rap music. At first, he built his name as a producer for other artists and in 2017 he started a collective called OCE4N. After a couple of years, he started to feel burnt out and even stopped making music to work a 9-5 for a year in 2020. When he quit the daily grind and threw himself fully into music again, it was good timing. A Thai underground scene has just started bubbling up, with many other rappers and singers taking a more experimental approach to music making. “A lot of people are doing weird stuff now,” he says. “I think the new generation of rappers support me because I’ve been on SoundCloud for a long time and they all started their accounts after I’d been there for a few years already.”
While S4EED raps in an even mix of Thai and English, he says that 90 percent of his listeners are Thai. When rapping in English, he goes into horror mode, describing how he’d kill people by pulling their guts out or making voodoo dolls to cast spells on scorned lovers. “Most of the evil stuff is in English because Thai people wouldn’t understand,” he explains. “This is pretty common in Western lyrics already but not here yet.” When he uses Thai, he tends to tell love stories, the standard fare of lyrical content here. Despite a core of local fans, he still rarely performs and feels that his style is hard to reproduce in an engaging way in a live setting but is happy to try when asked.
While S4EED cultivated his style on SoundCloud and the platform incubated this new Thai underground wave, he says that things are starting to shift back to YouTube and Spotify again. But he’s been collaborating with 666KT, who makes all of his videos, and their work together has created a more complete vision, one that’s damaged beyond repair and dispels with any sleek digital trickery. “We’re trying to bring a more alternative style, something that existed in the early 2000s but represented in a way that people now and in the future can easily get into it if they’re not from that generation,” KT explains. “We don’t enjoy the mainstream. We take a lot of pride and time in making sure what we create is outside of the box.” They both feel that it’s inevitable that the wider world of Thai fans will catch on, considering it’s been popular in many places outside of the country for a few years already. “It’s just a matter of time,” S4EED adds with a grin.
