“Do I have to be a tortured artist?” asks the singer Corbin, sitting under a canopy of colorful umbrellas on an overcast day in Los Angeles. “Unfortunately, all of the music that I’ve made, that I like, I was not in a good place. The moments making the music were good, but everything around it was…not.”
It is a Thursday in late April, and Corbin is drinking a cup of coffee on the patio of a bicycle-themed cafe next to the L.A. river, talking about the “very sharp, double-edged sword” that comes with being an artist beloved for evincing sorrow. The next week, he will begin the Clown on Stage Tour, his first in eight years. The occasion is a new album called Crisis Kid, his first in four years. It’s his third solo album in the eleven years since Corbin blew up under the name Spooky Black, one of the first stars of the Soundcloud era. In the fall, he’ll go on his first European tour, before playing the States again on a tour of bigger rooms.
While not a complete transformation, Crisis Kid is a departure from Corbin’s past work in sound and theme. “I had a warmth in me,” he says, about the two-week stretch when most of the album was made with producers Elliot Kozel and Psymun, former fixtures of the Twin Cities scene who live in L.A. “The words seemed to write themselves,” he says. The music leans into an often up-tempo post-punk, new wave sound built on guitar riffs and 1980s drum machines, rather than the Sadboy R&B that Corbin helped pioneer. The songwriting is still plenty morbid. On the lead single, “Carbon Monoxide,” chemical poisoning is a metaphor for a troubled relationship. Yet it doesn’t ooze with the same internal torment as past projects. Instead, it interrogates the roots of our collective discontent. Corbin’s voice sounds as clear and unconcealed as it ever has, and the result can be arrestingly earnest; a new register that he describes as an attempt to make “realistically optimistic” music for the first time.
As he talks, I glance at his neck, where he has a tattoo of a circus clown holding a bundle of medieval flanged maces as if they were a bunch of balloons. It sneaks out of a dark plaid shirt with faint yellow stripes that he wears with baggy cargo pants and high-top black Doc Marten boots. With a thin beard and dirty blonde hair styled in an artfully uneven bowl cut, the weary 27-year-old still resembles the baby-faced teenager he emerged as a decade ago.
Clowns have long resonated with Corbin. He has often contrasted the unrelenting sadness of his music with an absurdist, self-deprecating public image. It was part personality quirk, part defense mechanism. To say that Corbin has discomfort with fame, and the way he became famous — rapidly, at age 16, online, from a video he never expected anyone, let alone millions, to watch — would be a gross understatement. The long gaps between his releases have given him some time to mature. The distance also makes Crisis Kid a chance for Corbin, an infamous recluse, to reintroduce himself after years of anxiety, paranoia, and self-destructive behavior intensified by drugs and alcohol. Now, he feels called to something bigger than himself. “If I can even help one person feel better for a moment,” he says. “Then that’s what I need to do.”
In the last couple of years, Corbin got sober, went vegan, and became engaged with politics and spirituality. He got a manager and signed a record deal with the British indie label September. He unblocked every major music publication on his social media accounts and started to post to promote the album. Notoriously press-shy, he agreed to this interview. He speaks softly, with a matter-of-fact bluntness. As we begin to chat, he sits off-center with his gaze fixed on his hands, where he rips up the receipt for his coffee into smaller and smaller strips and forms them into a neat stack. He admits that despite his best effort, he feels himself pulled back into his shell. “I’d like to hold true to my word. I know that once I see the work actually affecting people positively, then it will be worth it,” he says. “In the past I just ignored everything. I just tried to ignore the world.”
Rounding a decade in the music industry, Corbin is in a unique position. He earns enough from streaming royalties to live a modest life in Los Angeles. He has a car and an apartment that he shares with his girlfriend and a French bulldog named Blicky. He has free time to make music with friends, or play games on his SteamDeck when he’s uninspired (which is often). He’s not a star. But he’s comfortable. And he retains a rabid cult following — every date of his tour sold out within 24 hours, many within mere minutes. (Days before our interview, a trove of years-old music leaked onto the internet, and devoted fans rejoiced like it was a holiday.) He’s an underground legend close enough to the mainstream to pop up in a scene-stealing appearance on a Skrillex song in 2023 (“A lovely guy,” Corbin said of Chief Keef, his collaborator on “Bad For Me”). And he was profoundly influential on a generation of artists who became household names. Yet he did not. And he does not seem to want to change that.
Corbin’s closest friends and collaborators attest to a rare combination of singular talent, exacting standards, and art-for-art’s-sake purity. But was there a point when his rigid, uncompromising artistic integrity became torturous? For a teenage would-be pop star in the social media age, there’s a thin line between sabotage and survival.
“I NEVER REALLY saw a future for myself,” says Corbin, reflecting on his childhood and early teenage years. If not for music, he’d have rather joined the army than go to college (“Obviously I didn’t know the extent of American imperialism at the time,” he says). One of his mothers (Corbin’s parents are a Lesbian couple; he and his older brother were conceived via a sperm donor) is a minister at a Unitarian Universalist church outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, where Corbin grew up. He took guitar lessons as a kid and sang in the choir in high school. He experimented in his parents’ basement making his own tunes, taking inspiration from sounds as disparate as Indie Folk singer Gregory Alan Isakov and the enigmatic Virginia rapper Lil Ugly Mane, and posting them on Soundcloud. Then in February 2014, a week after his 16th birthday, while still a Sophomore at St. Paul Central high school, he uploaded a lo-fi music video to YouTube under the name Spooky Black, his life changed forever. It was a song called Without U, and sought to emulate the loverboy R&B of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Corbin sang tearfully, with a preternatural elegance and sophistication. The caption on WorldStarHipHop summed it up well: “This Man’s R&B Game Is On 100: White Boy With Durag Voice Might Surprise You!”
It was also difficult to take seriously, and the image of a cherubic white teenager prancing through the snow in a du-rag, turtleneck, and gold chain struck some as mockery, even minstrelsy, rather than homage. “I was trying to honor people like Joe and Keith Sweat,” says Corbin. “But at the end of the day, it came across as me clowning them to some people.” In quick succession, Corbin formed a band called the stand4rd with three buzzing artists in the local scene several years his senior, Allan Kingdom, Bobby Raps, and Psymun. Then he dropped the Spooky Black moniker for his given name. Both decisions could be read as declarations of intent: an artist at maximum leverage who abandoned his gimmick and ceded the spotlight when it shined brightest.
“I remember when he first blew up, he deleted his Twitter. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. He’d just gained so many followers overnight, and then he said, ‘I’m deleting this.’ It was really inspiring to me,” says Psymun, who I visit at his home studio in Glendale, where he sits surrounded by several keyboards, drum machines, and at least a half dozen guitars. A large Palestine flag hangs behind his monitor. “You can get so caught up in ‘Are people listening to this? Are people going to like this?’ Corbin is genuinely not interested in that,” he says. Another artist in Corbin’s position ten years ago would have taken “every single opportunity to further their career,” says Psymun, who has since gone on to produce for artists like FKA Twigs, Bon Iver, and Young Thug. “Corbin avoided every single opportunity. I think that says a lot about who he is.”
The first time I met Corbin was not long after the release of Without U, when I interviewed thestand4rd. At the time, he was managed by Doc McKinney, who produced The Weeknd’s debut House of Balloons. McKinney, like Corbin and his bandmates, was originally from St. Paul. Under his tutelage, the stand4rd dropped a record and toured the US. They sold out every show. At their New York stop, they were introduced onstage by DJ Khaled, who wanted to sign Corbin to a record deal with his label, We The Best Music Group. “I would like, kill myself,” Corbin says in a sarcastic, deadpan tone. “Khaled was really supportive and nice,” he clarifies. “He just wanted to, you know, chase the big thing.” That was one of many offers flooding Corbin’s inbox at the time. Another was Diplo’s Mad Decent. (“That wouldn’t have been a good fit.”)
Eventually, he signed a deal with a subsidiary of XL Recordings, the venerable English label that’s been home to artists like Adele, King Krule, and Jai Paul. He and Psymun recorded an acoustic album at the famous Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal. “Maybe it wasn’t what XL was expecting. Maybe I couldn’t explain what the vision of the record was enough. But they didn’t end up wanting to release it,” says Corbin. After the record fell through, the deal ended. “There’s no ill will there,” he says, referring to one of the A&Rs as a “sweetheart.”
Thestand4rd dissolved almost as quickly as they formed, but Corbin remained close with Bobby and Psymun. The group’s impact was substantial. They were a major influence on the rap group Brockhampton. I know this because in 2015, on a sidewalk in Austin at South By Southwest, I watched the future bandleaders of the then little-known crew flock to Bobby Raps like fanboys. A few years later, Brockhampton would go on to sign a $15 million record deal.
“My expectations for us and myself back then was that we were going to be the greatest artists of all time. That kind of thinking ended up hurting me in the long run,” says Bobby, who has released several solo albums since, and written and produced for artists like The Weeknd, Future, and Lil Uzi Vert. Corbin was acutely aware of the corrosive effects of internet fame and what it could do to a young, sensitive artist like himself. “As much as some of Corbin’s choices could have been interpreted as self-sabotage, it could have been interpreted as self-preservation in the long run,” says Bobby. “Even if he was losing himself, he didn’t fully lose himself.”
One of those choices was to log off. “I saw what the power [of internet fame] did to other people, and I didn’t like what I saw,” he tells me. He did his best to stay completely offline — it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 2019 that he got his first Iphone. One can sense the longing for escape on Mourn, his 2017 album produced by Los Angeles beat scene mainstay Shlohmo. It’s built on a story about a couple fleeing the city to live out the end of the world together in the countryside. “We’ll get out of town, leave the coast here, it’s a two day drive if we both steer,” he croons on the first verse of the brooding opener “ICEBOY.” On the album standout “Hunker Down,” Corbin and his mate are safely ensconced in the woods, with a busted VCR and a stack of records to ride out the apocalypse. The concept album was a case of art imitating life. One of Corbin’s first big purchases from his showbiz money when he turned 18 was a small hunting cabin ninety minutes north of the Twin Cities, in the middle of nowhere. After Mourn, he lived there for a year and some change, with a flip phone, and did his best to block everything else out.
In doing so, he missed the rise and fall of the era he helped usher into existence. Corbin lists a trio of breakout artists from the late 2010s: Lil Peep, Juice Wrld, and XXXtentacion. All three of them blew up in his wake, and all three passed away in the last three years of the decade, before any of them celebrated their 22nd birthday. “I wish I had tried to speak with them more,” says Corbin. “I was just in my own world,” he says. “Now they’re being fucking memed. People are spitting on their graves. It’s crazy.” He briefly met Lil Peep after the late artist had gotten offstage at a show. He spoke with Juice Wrld on FaceTime just days before he, like Peep, would suffer a fatal drug overdose. He never met XXXtentacion, but according to X’s close friend DJ Scheme, Corbin was a central influence on him. “I could’ve been one of them. I probably also would have been dead. And I knew that too. I was like, there is one path. If I take this path, I’m not going to want to be on it for long,” says Corbin. “I would have reacted in similar ways to them, whether it would have been drugs or whatever else that brought me to a breaking point.”
Corbin’s breaking point wouldn’t come until after he moved to Los Angeles shortly before Covid, as part of a wave of like-minded musicians from the Twin Cities scene including Bobby and Psymun. As pandemic restrictions began to lift, Corbin recorded much of what became the 2021 album Ghost With Skin. He was also using, as he made clear on songs like “Diazepam,” titled after the generic name for Valium, which can be taken to treat alcohol withdrawal. “Don’t want no Benzodiazepines, seems that every week I’m getting sicker, I just keep going back to the liquor,” he sings in a weepy, garbled, wail. Corbin had been dealing with what he described as episodes of psychosis for years. Sometimes he heard voices. He developed a paranoia so crippling that at one point he began to carry a gun in public. “It was never a cool thing. It was out of fear,” he says. “I definitely should not have had a gun at the time.” He alludes to self-harm. “I definitely traumatized people by what I was doing to myself,” he says. “I’ve put Bob and Psymun through a lot of terror.”
“He’s never hard on other people. He’s only hard on himself. So when he’s at his most destructive, it’s directed at himself,” says Psymun. “He doesn’t have a single ounce of spite in him. He’s just pure,” he says.
Friends in the past tried to stage interventions, and Corbin himself made attempts to get help, which resulted in him joining a Narcotics Anonymous men’s circle in Minnesota the year before he moved to LA. He started 2023 with a bout of sobriety. But then, during a stint in a windowless room in the W Hotel in Beverly Hills, which he describes in vague terms as a “free living situation,” Corbin relapsed and truly hit rock bottom. “A public crash out would’ve been even more traumatic,” says Corbin. “I think it would’ve been more than a crash out,” he says. Then he laughs. “I unfortunately say ‘crash out.’” If sobriety was to stick, he thought, he couldn’t ignore the world anymore. The angst of the “sadboy” wave of music that Corbin helped pioneer could feel self-indulgent. Sadness for sadness’s sake, without deeper examination, can easily turn destructive and nihilistic. Corbin asked himself a question: “Who is the master of my sorrow?” All that time he’d been numbing himself, his peers were becoming radicalized. Like many, he went looking for answers in YouTube and TikTok rabbit holes.
At the cafe, Corbin seems ready to discuss the fucked up state of the world. His disgust at the complicity of the Democratic party and the entertainment industry in Israel’s wanton killing of Palestinians. His fear for the safety of his parents as the climate towards the LGBTQ community worsens in Trump’s second term. He mentions volunteering with his girlfriend to help the unhoused community in Skid Row. He plans to read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, an eerily prescient 1993 novel that envisioned Los Angeles in 2024, beset by apocalyptic fires and political violence. He laments the rise of police training facilities like Atlanta’s “Cop City” as an ominous reaction to the George Floyd uprising. Corbin returned home after Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, and was outside the 3rd police precinct the night protesters overtook the building and set it aflame. “Even though it was the most sad and disheartening time, there were still hints of beauty in it,” he says.
Bobby describes Crisis Kid as “Corbin making an album full of positive affirmations.” On songs like “Come Down,” Corbin does sound like he’s leading a group therapy session. “Be a light in the dark, go and make your mark. I know life gets hard, swimming with the sharks. Don’t be ashamed of your scars. It made you who you are.” But then, on the album closer, “Another Day In Hell,” you can hear him try to reassemble his generation’s malaise into the building blocks for something like revolution. “Another day in hell. And you’re not by yourself. Everyone else is in here with you. I can get you a tissue…When the sorrow ends. That’s when theirs begins.”
A COUPLE OF days after I speak with Corbin, I meet up with Bobby Raps at a cafe he frequents in North Hollywood. “I have one for Corbin, too,” says the barista. A fan, she reaches across the counter and hands Bobby a jar of homemade blackberry jam. Bobby tells her that he’ll try to get her on the guest list for their next show. He’ll join Corbin on tour in the fall, and they both mentioned plans to soon record a sequel to their 2015 joint EP Couch Potato.
Bobby was one of the first people Corbin ever collaborated with in person, outside of his parents basement. The first day they met, he wore a Bobby Raps T Shirt that he’d caught at one of Bobby’s shows. “All of a sudden, I felt like a protective big brother,” Bobby says. “I wanted to make sure that he could do the things he wanted to do and make the music he wanted to make.” They’ve continued to support each other through hard times. In late 2024, when Bobby decided that he also needed to get sober, the first person he called was Corbin. “He really showed up for me more than anyone in my life,” Bobby says. “He’s just the purest, sweetest person I’ve ever met.”
When Corbin first moved to LA, he and Bobby spent many days at the Pacific Palisades home of the producer Rex Kudo, whose credits read as a who’s-who of the last decade’s rap superstars, and who recently produced M.I.A.’s “Marigold.” We leave the cafe and drive to a studio nearby where Kudo has been working since his Palisades house burned down in the January wildfires. “Corbin is a true if you know, you know artist,” says Kudo. “I’ll say this to Corbin, too. He’s probably the most challenging artist I’ve ever worked with,” he says.
“Some people can just crank something out just to do it. And I don’t think that he’s really like that,” adds Bobby. “He likes to make music that he really believes in and stands on.” Kudo says that during sessions, Corbin will lay something down that leaves the entire studio in awe. Then, he’ll say, “I hate how my voice sounds,” and ask to scrap it. “But that’s what it’s like working with the greats,” says Kudo. “The greatest art takes the greatest patience.”
Recently, though, they had a session where things felt different. As we speak, Corbin’s voice shoots through the studio’s speakers. It’s an uncanny coincidence. Kudo wasn’t expecting us, but was working on a song featuring Corbin for a project he is spearheading called Sacred Family, which he describes as a “band with unlimited members.” When they made the song, Kudo explained to Corbin that he believes certain artists are messengers to the world. As one of the “godfathers of the Sadboy shit, the New Age Emo shit,” as Kudo describes him, Corbin had made so many people feel like they were not alone. In that session, something clicked. “Corbin was like, ‘I can show them a way out,’” says Kudo. “That day was the first time there were no challenges working with Corbin.”
Before we leave, Kudo plays us the song. It begins with a church choir harmonizing, and then gives way to Corbin singing over a tender acoustic guitar riff. “I know where it hurts…ego is a curse.” It spills into a sort of orchestral California surf rock injected with the maximalism of modern rap production. Imagine if The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was in the studio with All of the Lights-era Kanye West. It sounds ecstatic and triumphant. Two words that rarely, if ever, have been used to describe another Corbin song. “Walk with love beside you,” Corbin sings. “Do I gotta remind you? Glory is inside you too.”
The day I meet with Corbin, he invites me to come by later that evening to watch the end of his last rehearsal before the tour. I arrive at a building on the east side of LA, across the street from a Mexican flower shop. The space is a DIY music venue with murals lining the walls. Corbin stands on a small stage with Psymun and his tour guitarist, Lula. A soundman in an L.A. Raiders Jacket named Tanner, sits at a mixing board in front of them. Corbin’s manager, Parks, is in the back, finalizing details for the tour. It is the third run-through of their setlist of the day. Corbin stands at an angle with one hand holding the microphone and one hand in his pocket, shifting his weight from side to side, his eyes fixed on a space in the wall. The last song they rehearse is the album’s namesake, Crisis Kid. “This is to cast away the unfriendly ghosts,” Corbin says. A joke, but the song, and the album it’s named for, feels like Corbin warding off demons. “Break the banks, replace their laws. Destructivе faith, no, they’re not God. Profit off pain, kill our prophets off. Toxic rain, toxic thought. Know thе cost, war’s not lost.” Afterward, Tanner asks if he should know about any sound cues for moments during the tour where Corbin will address the audience. “No, I’ll probably just be shy,” Corbin replies. He pauses for a moment. “Maybe I’ll have something to say.”
