This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Royalty Issue, no. 370, Winter 2022. Order your copy here.
There’s a lot that suggests the brothers of Rae Sremmurd are getting older. Initially, they seemed like a package deal, as conjoined conceptually as Kris Kross, but adulthood unyokes even kin. For starters, when we talk they aren’t together, even though they’re in the same city. They come across as mellow now, and as individuals with diverging personal lives. Yet even with the differences that arise with coming of age, you can still see the symmetry of siblings with converging interests. Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi recently returned from touring in Asia, and they can’t quite agree on the experience. Jxmmi, who is walking through Los Angeles as we speak, loved the foreign crowds. But Swae, sprawled out on a couch in the studio of his Woodland Hills mansion holding his phone over his face, isn’t convinced. He remembers at least one city having a more turnt audience pre-pandemic. Though they disagree about the energy, they still both clearly have a shared love of riling up mobs with their expansive catalogue of oddball party favours.
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These differing perspectives feel reflective of the ways the two brothers spent the last few years. Swae calls it growing gracefully. Jxmmi took a step back and reevaluated the things he was doing. “I was living the self-destructive rockstar lifestyle. I was having a mental breakdown,” he says. “I was doing drugs, I was drinking, I was partying, I was with the girls. When the pandemic happened, I just decided to lock down. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I wasn’t proud of what I saw. I wanted to fix a lot of things about myself, and I took the time to do that. I did therapy. I was in the gym. I was with my family, my friends, my loved ones, and I just was off the road. I cleaned up my whole life. I wanted to be somebody who my kids could look up to and I feel like now I’m that person.”
While Slim Jxmmi retreated from the public eye to “get his life together,” Swae remained outwardly visible as he recorded nonstop from his home studio. He continued to release solo singles, “crowd-surfed” during an Instagram Live performance, and survived a car crash with Mike Will Made-It. All the while he built up a trove of songs, waiting for the outside world to open again (Mike claimed, in 2020, that Swae submitted 733 songs for a new album). In his excitement to return to normalcy, he prematurely declared Covid was over in a Miami club in July 2021.
This dichotomy – one brother more reserved, the other more pressed – seems to define them. It coloured their epic previous release SR3MM, which tacked solo outings onto a Rae Sremmurd album. Swae explored the fluidity and range of his voice while Jxmmi transitioned to a more spartan, metallic trap sound. It is also represented in the ways they work together creatively. “Swae records super long hours and I record more business hours,” Jxmmi says, differentiating between a tradesman and an obsessive. “My whole world revolves around it,” Swae adds. “I want to get to the highest level. I have to keep unlocking different gates and doors and seeing what my voice can do. So, I’m just steadily making new vibes – they might come out ten years from now, five months from now, a week from now, it might never come out, who knows? But one of them joints will come out and one of them’s gonna be the one to keep your bills paid.” Rae Sremmurd, as defined by Swae, is music made for social people. They are clearly both gregarious, and it’s easy to imagine the bickering that might arise on a bad day at the office.
Some friction between them in 2019 led to speculation that they were going to split up – after some incendiary tweets from Jxmmi – but they continue to downplay any infighting as character development. Their new album, Sremm4Life, is somewhat indicative of party boys becoming party men. The title implies an eternal brotherly bond. They see their individual progressions as part of their evolution as a unit. As Jxmmi puts it, “Us growing personally helps the group.”
Whatever the glue, it’s obvious they are better together, and they’ve been together long enough to shake up the formula. “SremmLife 1 is the intro: we come in loud as hell. On 2, we give you that energy. On 3, we give you a little bit of individuality. And I feel on this one it’s time to open up,” Jxmmi explains. “It’s the fourth album, it’s time to show people we’re more than just some party boys. We’re people too. We’re humans and we’re just trying to make it through life the same way you’re trying to.” Making it through has been tougher as of late. In 2020, their dad was shot and killed, and last year their brother was charged in the murder. Some of the new music reflects their reality. “We lost our father. Our little brother – he in prison. So we touch on loss, how it hurt our family and how it hurt us. We talk about having kids – you know, we got kids now – and our families and still being young and having a good time at the same time.”
“It’s time to show people we’re more than just some party boys. We’re humans and we’re just trying to make it through life the same way you are.” JXMMI
There has long been a sense that the fun-loving nature inherent to the duo’s music prevents them from being taken seriously, but what may seem like a semi-serious turn for them is more a natural advance than a response. “We were the ones that got the number one records; they just said something about it,” Swae says, presenting a theory on perspective and commentators. “I wouldn’t even listen to their thought processes because if you weigh one against the other I would say they are wrong.” Both brothers seem genuinely unbothered by the prospect of outside criticism. “I can’t be nobody else. I’m gonna be myself,” Jxmmi says. “We’re gonna keep evolving. And people can think what they want to think. They’re gonna find something to complain about. So, I’m gonna keep being myself. Swae’s gonna keep being himself. We’re gonna keep being Rae Sremmurd.” If nothing else, the brothers seem aligned in purpose.
But what do their respective futures look like? “I’m trying to be the greatest fucking artist of this generation – of the next fifty generations.” Jxmmi is no less eager or enterprising. “I’m finna box. I’m gonna act. If somebody needs a backup dancer and they call me, I’m on the road!” he says, grinning. “Every talent that God gave me I want to use. I’m not gonna stop at hip-hop, you know I’m saying? Because Jay-Z didn’t become a billionaire doing hip-hop. I want to be multifaceted.”
As far as they are concerned, they don’t need to separate to accomplish all of that. Honestly, they seem most in sync imagining global conquest, with a shared childlike optimism. “We want to keep unlocking doors with our talent and our ideas because ideas get the bag rolling,” Swae says, earnestly. “We just want to stay locked in forever.”
Credits
Photography Steven Traylor
Fashion Mecca Cox
Hair Rachel Lee at MA+ Group using Oribe
Photography assistance Harris Mizrahi and Michele Pescione
Fashion assistance Angela Gutierrez
Tailor Coco Emery
Production Camera Club
Special thanks to Insomniac Events, The Icon, Chroma Center and Pia Mileaf-Patel
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING