Joey Valence and Brae

This isn't your dad's hip-hop revival. It's your little brother's cracked YouTube playlist—and it slaps.

If rap music has always moved in cycles—reviving sounds, refashioning language, finding new forms of rebellion—then Joey Valence & Brae are best understood not as revivalists, but as remixers of cultural memory. Their music draws on the past with precision, but never nostalgia. Their references may come from golden-era hip-hop, skate culture, and Saturday morning cartoons, but the delivery is unmistakably attuned to the glitchy, post-chronological sensibilities of the TikTok age.

To call them "underrated" is accurate, but not quite sufficient. What they're doing doesn't slip under the radar because it's lacking—it slips because there's no established lane for it to drive through. Joey Valence & Brae operate in a unique hybrid space: not quite parody, not quite homage, not quite subversion. And yet, it all works. Their music lands with both the clarity of intent and the energy of chaos.

Not Just Throwback—A Rewiring

A song like "Double Jump" doesn't simply reference video games, it moves like one—each verse is a level, each beat switch a shift in terrain. Their production might nod toward classic hip-hop, but it's also informed by EDM build-ups, glitchcore edits, and punk's structural refusal to linger.

Their world-building isn't just musical; it's aesthetic. The visuals accompanying their music—grainy fisheye skate footage, VHS-style overlays, explosions of neon text—evoke the lawless feel of early YouTube, filtered through modern editing software. They're not imitating the past so much as they're curating its fragments, repurposing its textures into something tactile and immediate.

Structure by Instinct, Not Tradition

In an era where rap albums are often measured by cohesion or conceptual unity, Joey Valence & Brae take a different approach. Their projects operate like highlight reels: brief, bombastic, deliberately overstimulating. Songs bleed into each other like rapid-fire channel switches. Hooks come and go. Bridges collapse as quickly as they're built.

But this is not a result of artistic immaturity—it's a conscious reflection of attention economy aesthetics. There is a craft to the chaos. Every breakbeat is meticulously placed. Their back-and-forth verses are tightly locked, never stepping on each other's rhythm. The fact that they can maintain such sonic velocity without losing their footing is an underappreciated technical achievement.

They don't build arcs so much as loops—vignettes that reset the moment they end, pulling you back in through sheer momentum. It's not music made for long-form narrative—it's made for repetition, recirculation, and the compulsive joy of re-entry.

The Joke That Was Never a Joke

Part of what keeps critics from fully embracing them may be their humor. Joey Valence & Brae are funny—unapologetically so. They rap about kung fu flicks, GameCube controllers, junk food, and espionage like they're writing an action-comedy soundtrack scored by El-P. But they don't condescend to the subject matter. There's no ironic distance. The humor doesn't undermine the music—it reinforces it.

This is a kind of sincerity that often gets lost in contemporary rap, where detachment and nonchalance are worn like armor. Valence & Brae have no interest in looking cool. They're animated, hyper-present, sometimes absurd. But in a genre where emotional vulnerability is prized, this exuberance is its own kind of exposure. There's something intimate about how earnestly they lean into the ridiculous.

Like the early days of Odd Future—or even early Eminem—their ability to balance humor and sharp technicality is key. The difference is that JV&B rarely punch down. Their barbs are self-directed, or aimed at abstract targets: the industry, the monotony of algorithmic art, the expectation that rap must conform to one of several approved aesthetics.

Internet Rap Without the Internet Crutch

In the past five years, the internet has produced a staggering range of rap subgenres: rage, pluggnb, glitchcore, ambient trap. Much of it sounds like it was designed to thrive in compressed, looped formats—songs meant to soundtrack 15-second clips rather than reward long listening sessions. Joey Valence & Brae come from this same internet-native generation, but their output insists on more.

There's an analog warmth to their mixing. You can hear the low-end crunch, the vinyl crackle layered into the high-end. The tracks aren't mastered for Instagram—they're engineered to fill a room. The energy feels physical, tactile. You can imagine the songs being performed live without losing their impact—no need for backing tracks or carefully synced lighting cues. Just two voices, one beat, and the chaotic magnetism of people who want to be heard.

Underrated by Design

There's a reason why, despite millions of streams, they're rarely cited alongside today's critically approved "alternative" rap voices. The industry doesn't know how to categorize artists who sidestep the expected modes of seriousness or prestige. Joey Valence & Brae aren't concerned with the codes of cool. Their art feels rooted in fun, but never careless. It's musical world-building that thrives on specificity—a kind of curatorial maximalism.

They're not chasing virality. They're not cultivating mysterious personas. And that lack of artifice might be their greatest liability, at least from the perspective of gatekeeping institutions. They don't perform authenticity. They simply make what they want, how they want, and somehow still manage to make it land.

The Future That Already Happened

What makes Joey Valence & Brae so compelling is that they're making music that feels both retroactive and prescient. They've absorbed the hyper-eclecticism of the internet but avoided its traps. Their work speaks fluently in cultural references, but never relies on them for meaning. The result is music that feels timeless not because it reaches for the past, but because it was never fully anchored in the present.

They've built a body of work that sidesteps the traditional industry path entirely—no blockbuster features, no label-engineered aesthetics, no algorithm-optimized singles. Just two artists, locked in, making music that refuses to slow down or simplify itself for mass digestion.

And maybe that's what makes them underrated: they don't play the game. They've built their own. And they're sprinting through it, laughing the whole way.