The Underachievers

East Coast hip-hop duo the Underachievers came together in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section during 2011, built around the two rappers AK and Issa Gold. AK had previously performed under the solo alias “The Underachiever” and extended that same name to the pair once they started working together, a choice that reflected their shared enthusiasm for cannabis, psychedelic exploration, and other pursuits often dismissed as signs of underachievement by conventional standards. That fascination with mind-altering substances shaped the group’s early aesthetic, yielding a hallucinatory style that fused rapid-fire flows with dense, boundary-pushing beats. Footage of one of their initial songs reached the ears of the widely respected producer Flying Lotus, prompting him to add the duo to his Brainfeeder roster in 2012; the imprint then issued a pair of their mixtapes the following year. Their first proper studio album, Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium, appeared in August 2014. The ambitious follow-up Evermore: The Art of Duality arrived in 2015, its track listing divided into opposing “light” and “dark” halves. Another mixtape, It Happened in Flatbush, surfaced in 2016 and preceded the arrival of the group’s third full-length project, Renaissance.