Ericdoa is the face of Hyperpop you have yet to see
He quickly felt isolated from his high school peers once arriving on the scene, he was tackling being a student and a sensation at once, but this was a greater escape than anyone could've foreseen for him. His first single, "dismay" landed in obscure and popular YouTube videos and quickly gained traction from there. Now he leads with his newest project, Things With Wings, and says the biggest difference between his music now and then is maturity.
Things With Wings is available on May 20th, 2022, but in the meantime read the interview with the artist below.
Can you take us back to the first moment when you believed that this could be your career?
To bring it all the way back, I believe that my entire situation was that I would scroll through YouTube a lot. I wanted to like find music because I would just either listen to the stuff that my parents put me onto, or the radio. I wanted to see since Tumblr was going crazy, and there was this whole YouTube side of people uploading music, I wanted to find stuff. And I found this one song where this artist, his name is Benny Mills, and this song was called "Western." It was like really literally hard rap song. And I was like, 'nah, I could do this.' And that was when I was like 12 years old. I was like still in middle school. And that's when I downloaded it, I felt it for the first time, but I really didn't start to experiment until I got into like high school.
Were you always a kid of the internet, and constantly scrolling trying to find new things to be interested in? Like, what was your Tumblr blog about? What were you looking at on YouTube?
I was looking at like monochrome pictures. I was looking at Renaissance art, I was a nerd. I was just looking at like the stuff that I thought was aesthetically pleasing because that's what Tumblr was for at one point. And people have so many different reasons for why they use it, but my sister had Tumblr and I was like, 'nah, what is this?' And it just put me on a lot of stuff, I didn't really blog like that, I was an observer, not a post-er.
I feel like Tumblr gives you such a superiority complex. I remember seriously being on there when I was like 12-14, and just being like, "no one understands me."
I have the same shit! Like, "no one gets it. I'm misunderstood."
So with being a kid of the internet, it can honestly make you feel a little bit isolated. Did you ever feel like music or feel like whatever art form you were into at that time was like a great escape from what you were doing in your daily life?
It was a total shift. It was an entire life-changing type of thing for me. It was an escape that you can't describe. Like, I was able to have an outlet where I could throw everything that like plagued me in a sense into one thing into one little file. And I was able to revisit it when I wanted to and share it with people, and know that other people who are doing the same thing as me and are going through the same stuff. It was very calming. It was a sense of feeling grounded. And that's literally all I had for my years in high school.
Do you remember who was plaguing you at that moment and what you would tell your younger self now?
From ages, like 13 to17, it was like there's something wrong with my brain and I need to figure it out. It was a lot of things, I had like raging OCD, raging ADHD. I had anxiety, It was like terrible. And it was a mixture of all those things, like every day. And it was just like a journey of figuring out, 'okay, this is normal. I don't know why I'm feeling like this, but this is normal.'
Do you remember what music was getting you through that time? Was there was a soundtrack for your life at that time?
Oh man, SoundCloud was the biggest fucking thing on the planet, like in my eyes. I was listening to like SoundCloud rappers that like nobody knew who they were. So like a lot of like rip turtle got me through a lot of shit, like PPGCasper. I was listening to like Carti, UNO, Fani, and indie music. So it was a mixture of like SoundCloud music and indie music. And that's all I would listen to literally.
There's such a psychology behind music and how it makes you feel, and how making music yourself should make others feel. Does that go through your mind when you're making music or do you just make music for yourself?
It's a mixture of two different things. I believe that music is something sacrilegious. It's not something that's just a creation and it's just like, 'oh, I made this song.' Music is a language. Music is like ways that you could talk to somebody that you have no idea who they are and they could listen to you. Even if it's like, oh, I like this song, but that's not really what people are there for. They're there to experience what the song is, even if they don't know it. Subconsciously they're tapping into your existence. And that's why I love music so much is because I've always had a problem with looking at people and being like something's going on in their brain. Like they're existing. They have a totally different life than I do. They have a separate life than I do. I don't know how they feel, but when I'm able to listen to somebody's music or vice versa, they're able to tap into my existence and see my world through my eyes. And I think that's beautiful.
That's so true about music being a language because I feel like I often view music as an experience and an activity. People always think of music as something that serves in the background of experiences.
It can't be, it literally can't be. There's no way that music can just be a brainless background thing. A lot of people like myself and a lot of people that I make music with it seems so brainless. And it seems so second nature, but subconsciously you're making the most exhausting, but rewarding and beautiful creation.
When did you start gaining recognition? What was the song? When was it and how did it kind of make you feel? Were you moving very differently in school?
I felt like the man inside! I felt like the man inside, I wasn't being like a dick head, you know. I was put on one of those like YouTube videos, It was a song called "dismay." I was put on one of those YouTube videos that are like "underground songs that you need to hear: month of July" And they just threw it on there, and it gained more traction. It was the first time I ever hit a hundred thousand plays for me. And I was like, 'nah, I'm that guy!' I was excited. It was something that I felt like was a piece of me that, it was like a diary entry that I was able to have people enjoy. And that's what just my music became at first it was just like, I'm gonna rap. And then it was like, oh, I'm going to pour my entire brain out into these songs. And then hopefully people don't think I'm a sociopath.
How do you go from hard-rap to hyperpop? Especially since hyperpop is a genre that's dominated by people who don't look like you.
It's crazy, right? There's not a lot of people who like me that are in that scene that — I'm very happy that it's dominated by a diverse and queer and POC area. But yeah, no, I mean, go by he/they. I am Puerto Rican and Panamanian. I feel good man. Like everybody inside of that area is just very welcoming and warm. Like that label for hyperpop is just a word that I think Spotify came up with. We're just all making everything because we bump music. It's just like every person that was in that community when I was coming up from transitioning into that side of the making hyperpop music, it was just like a situation that I was just trying to switch it up. I was bored and I was loving what I was hearing from a lot of the kids that were making music in this little corner of the internet that I never discovered. And I was like, 'okay, how could I do this? But not the same way.' And I implemented everything I love just like everybody else did because it's all a mixture. It's like an amalgamation of just 30 million different.
I feel like hyperpop comes with so many attachments to it. There's definitely a certain image. Did you ever feel the need to be pushed into that certain aesthetic visually?
I don't really think that certain aesthetic fits me, you know? There are people who push it on, don't get me wrong. But when it comes down to my whole thing is just the entirety of being yourself. Just being your absolute self and you know, me and my roommates and the people I make music are into our own things, and we have our own little aesthetic and the way that we look and hopefully that could be assigned to something that we do.
Going back from your last project to your newest, single, what do you think is the biggest growth you've seen within yourself?
I think I have learned to appreciate a lot of the things that are in front of me and be able to really mature through what I was making. I feel like when I was making my first project that everybody really listened to, it was an immature version of myself, I had a different outlook on the world. And now with this project, it is a more understanding, not a hundred percent mature, but definitely a more understanding and more vetted version of myself. It's stuff that I created with my like family, like the people that were around me and the people that helped me make music. This is our baby, this whole entire thing that we have right now. I think it was just a large jump of just creativity through maturity, growing and figuring out what life is about.
Can you paint the sonic landscape of your new track?
If I could paint you a beautiful picture of this album, I would say, imagine what audibly it would sound like of five boys just getting after what they always really wanted, and had an experience like no other for a year and a half. All of these songs are literally just packed into a .wav file of experiences of that bit. It could be us in LA, us in the mountains in Colorado, a random Airbnb, or a random studio somewhere. It could be something that I wrote after going to a party and meeting a person that I've always wanted to meet. After a cool dinner, after heartache, after an issue, after a victory, after a loss. It was all trial and error and all of the smile and frown moments a year and a half-packed into like 14 songs.
For the video, the concept behind it seems very dark and a visualizer for what would go on in someone's brain if they were living inside of a video game. Can you talk about the intention behind that?
Behind the song, it's basically the journey of becoming a— I don't wanna say the word commodity, or I don't wanna say that I'm being exploited because that's a hundred percent not the case. But when it comes down to, you know, the way that things are looked at, it's a commercialization of a hobby. I love Interscope Records, they did something amazing for me and it was an absolute blessing. So they became my lifeline. It was very difficult for me and my roommate at the time, before we signed, to like pay bills, I went hungry various nights. It was a tough situation that I was in and I felt like my label was a lifeline and unfortunately, it can become a commercialization of yourself.
I'm painting the picture of basically somebody who has given up something, but for a greater cause. And what that represents inside of the video is that this like fallacy, which is the video game, this fake world that is being built around a real situation is showing you that it's all a game of cat and mouse. You're constantly running, constantly chasing, and trying to succeed. But you know, some shit can get in the way of making it a game over, unfortunately.
How do you find a way to balance that all and put boundaries between yourself and kind of the success that helps you, but also can harm you in a way
I think off of your question, what can help is trying to be as self-aware as possible, this is a very depersonalizing job. And it's very easy to disconnect from your own body because of the things that you do or the people that you meet or the situations that you're put in. So I would say it's a lot of self-awareness. It's a lot of grounding yourself. It's a lot of finding the common ground and not sticking on a black or white and being in the gray area as much as you can.
What is something that you're most looking forward to? I know you're going on tour.
Oh my Lord. That, the festivals, being able to see my fans' faces in real life again. This is my first headline tour, so, I've never had a situation where people have just come for me and I'm excited. And then the album, of course, for everybody to hear our child.
This is your world, this is your utopia. You make the rules. What does it look like? What's going on there?
In my utopia, the sky is absolutely like the pink sky all the time. Like, you know, when like the sun is going down sometimes and it's like orange and pink. It's always golden hour. I think the only music that's allowed to be played is like all like old eighties 80s like pop, Teena Marie era. Mm-hmm She's the only person that's played. Every human right that we think is a human, but the U.S Is like, "Nah, that ain't no human right" is a human right. In my utopia, everybody got a free crib. Everybody has free food. Like we're living in a sharing, harmonious, type of vibe in my utopia.
