BONES Has Released Over 100 Projects and Still Answers to No One

BONES released his first project in 2010 at age 16, under the alias Th@ Kid, recording everything himself and putting it online for free. By the time he switched to the BONES alias in 2012, he had already built a catalog and a following that most artists spend years chasing. The argument his discography makes is simple: volume and independence, held together long enough, become their own kind of power.

Elmo Kennedy O'Connor was born in Muir Beach, California, in 1994 and grew up in Howell, Michigan. He dropped out of high school at 16 and moved to Los Angeles, where his brother Elliott was already living. Elliott became his manager. There was no label, no A&R, no rollout strategy. O'Connor recorded, uploaded, and moved on. The pace was the point.

By July 4, 2012, he had released his self-titled debut under the BONES name. From 2012 to 2014 he put out 12 projects before the press caught up. The Fader and Complex both landed on Garbage, released June 9, 2014, calling it "massive" and "boundary-pushing." Garbage featured Xavier Wulf, Chris Travis, Eddy Baker, and Spooky Black. Those names matter. BONES, Wulf, Travis, and Baker were already forming the collective SESHOLLOWATERBOYZ, a four-way alliance of underground rappers who had found each other online and were building something without a map.

The SESHOLLOWATERBOYZ model was decentralized by design. Each member ran their own lane. BONES ran his through TeamSESH, the label and collective he founded, which became the infrastructure for everything he released. Producer GREAF became his closest creative partner inside that structure. In April 2014, the two formed surrenderdorothy, a side project that leaned into acoustic guitar and singing, closer to indie rock and emo than anything in the rap conversation at the time. A year later, in May 2015, they launched a second project called OREGONTRAIL, darker and rougher in tone. BONES was not staying in one lane. He was building several simultaneously.

The crossover moment that put him in front of a wider audience came in 2015. The hook from his song "Dirt" was sampled by A$AP Rocky on "Canal St.," a track on Rocky's album At.Long.Last.ASAP. On September 17, 2015, BONES performed the song live with Rocky on Jimmy Kimmel Live. He was cut from the TV broadcast for refusing to censor the lyrics. Videos of the performance circulated online anyway. That refusal was consistent with everything else he had done: no compromise, no adjustment for the room.

Major labels noticed. Multiple offers came in. O'Connor and Elliott both confirmed the interest publicly. The labels, according to reporting at the time, wanted him to fill a specific slot, a white rapper in the mold of artists already on their rosters. He passed. TeamSESH stayed independent. That decision, made when the leverage was real, is part of what gives the catalog its coherence. Every release after it carries the same logic.

The single "CtrlAltDelete," released in 2015, crossed 12 million plays on streaming platforms without a label push, without a radio campaign, without any of the infrastructure that number usually requires. It got there because the fanbase BONES had built since 2010 was genuinely devoted and genuinely large. By 2024, his total output across all aliases had passed 100 releases. That number is not a flex. It is a description of how he works. The music comes out because he makes it, and he makes it constantly.

The genres that now carry his influence, cloud rap, emo rap, trap metal, underground rap, were not named or codified when he started. He was working in the space before the vocabulary existed. OmenXIII, who signed to Sumerian Records in 2022, has cited BONES as a primary inspiration. The lineage is real and it runs forward.

What BONES built is not a legacy in the retrospective sense. It is an ongoing operation. The catalog keeps growing. The independence holds. The audience, assembled one free download at a time starting in 2010, is still there.