Although BIJI aim to not be defined as just hip-hop, it is a fertile source of common ground that exists between the duo, and Frost grew up inside it. His dad was a rapper, a producer and an original street dancer, "one of the godfathers of boogaloo popping", and Frost often accompanied him to competitions. "I was sleeping on the dance competition floors, thinking, when can I go home?" Frost laughs. “We had a studio at home, and he was always making me make beats. And hip hop had these beautiful philosophies, especially from that era of the OGs. You couldn't really copy anyone. You had to be original, and it's about the energy. Growing up I'd hear about Run-DMC's first concert at the Roxy in New York, the energy they had on stage.”
When Nazari met Frost's father, something clicked for him too. “It was the first time I was speaking to someone about deep, deep boom bap music and he knew all the names, all the artists I was talking about, all the songs. I was so deep in it when I was young. I was an extremely keep-it-fucking-real type of guy. And Maceo didn't even know half of those songs.”
Driven by what comes across as consistent reminders of serendipity between the pair and their craft, and a mutual passion and appreciation for creating, BIJI spent the first two years following their formation in studios. "We were just experimenting day and night, trying to understand what was what, what this fusion is," Nazari recalls. “We travelled to Germany, to France, to the Netherlands, having sessions with producers, getting to know people in the industry. A lot of BIJI was growing in those rooms.”
The look of the project came from somewhere less expected. Frost describes a viral music video, a viral music video of men in bulletproof vests pointing AK-47s at the camera while singing with sincerity — something that caught his eye. "In my mind it clicked,” he says. “There's something when you hear a sound in an environment you've never put together before. It's like a glitch in the matrix. What would be our way of doing that? A trap hip hop song in Kurdistan with the uncles and drifting, something you've never seen,” he laughs.
But their first shoot was less AK-47s and drifting, and more subtle humour. On the first shoot, Nazari revealed himself to be a natural comic, leading Frost to reconsider what the visual world of BIJI might look like.
“I was like, ‘Robin, you're the Kurdish Charlie Chaplin!’. I thought we were making this serious music video in Kurdistan, and in the first ten minutes I'm like, this might actually be a comedy. So we just changed approach."
And the pair have worked that way ever since. "We approach it as documentary filmmakers," Frost says. "We find stories that excite us, people that excite us, places, towns, and then we go from there. We meet people, we get to know people, and we create stories based on real events, which is exactly how this album was made."
This was also propelled by advice that Nazari received from fellow musicians: the one who seeks will find. "It's really the spirit of BIJI," he says. “We can't create on demand. We're always searching, if it's samples, stories, graphic design, typography. Many people make a song and release it. The first two years we were just searching, and when we feel we're losing it, we say, 'Yo, let's go back to the lab and search.'”
And ultimately, that search led them to , which Nazari sees as the other half of the work that the pair have put out thus far. Their EPs BIJI, Pt. 1 and BIJI, Pt. 2 showed the dance music and the humour but shows how they think. "It's our other side," he says. Frost points out that it also asked more of Nazari on the page.
"We started the project focusing a lot on celebration, and we went more vulnerable in the lyrics. It's been hard to really open up. I think that's why it resonates." He reveals that they very nearly even cut “Tea With Sugar” the week before release, just out of fear of it being too heavy. "I'm like, I don't know about these sad songs, I wish we'd removed it. Then it comes out and everybody's writing that it's their favourite on the album." Nazari's reaction at the time, Frost says, was perfect. "He said, if you feel like you overshared, that's how you know it's a good song."