If you’ve visited the DopeHouse over the last half-decade, you’d be hard-pressed to not have come across a song from Russ. The Atlanta multi-talent dropped his first mixtape, Velvet, in December of 2011. Nearly every song he’s released since then — including double-digit mixtapes and over 250 songs — has made it to our pages.
After a couple years of releasing mixtapes and not finding the success he’d hoped for, he pivoted his marketing plan: instead of releasing bulks of songs at a time, he’d just drop a song a week until he blew up.
Russ uploaded his first song on SoundCloud, “Kiki,” on October 12, 2014 (of course we posted it) and on with the plan he went. At the beginning of last year, I interviewed Russ, really just impressed at the volume and consistency of his releases. All-in-all, though, he really just seemed ready to blow, and he knew he was going to.
Somewhere in the middle of 2016, he did. “Losin Control” and “What They Want” both caught traction on the radio, and he started touring the country, and then, the world. Now, it’d be disappointing if a song didn’t reach one million plays in a couple days once it’s uploaded to SoundCloud. It seems like the plan worked.
Now that he’s got his fan base, it’s time to release his official debut album. There’s Really A Wolf comes in at 20 tracks, including the two aforementioned singles, “Pull The Trigger,” “Do It Myself” and “Cherry Hill.” Like nearly every song he’s released thus far, he navigates the tracklist by himself.
Stream There’s Really A Wolf below, and cop it on iTunes. It’s the least you could do after six years of free music.
