Photo Credit: Ran Dolla
Brothers Donno and Dexxx have come to terms with fans calling them the MT Twins, even though the duo’s official name is just MT. Since MT already stands for Marshall Twins, calling them MT Twins is redundant, Donno maintains, but the brothers quickly realized nobody else shared their semantic concerns. “At first when people would call us MT Twins we were always adamant, ‘No, we’re MT!’” Donno says. “But now it’s like, if that’s what they want to call us, then fine.” So long as people are listening, he says, they can call the duo whatever they want.
And, to be sure, they’re listening. In the three years since the brothers started rapping seriously to pass the time after their varsity basketball season at Marshall High School ended—Marshall Twins was the nickname they picked up on the court—the 20-year-olds have climbed their way toward the top of Milwaukee rap’s A-list, doing numbers that make even some of the scene’s biggest names jealous. MT’s biggest song, “All Stars,” has nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube alone, on top of more than a half million streams on SoundCloud. Their single “Stay Down” has also passed the million stream mark, and they’ve got too many others to list in the half-million range.
Credit their adaptability for that success. Nearly every Milwaukee rap act making real waves right now is doing so on the back of the city’s highly regional sound, a sort of localized spin on the distinctive slap of Detroit rap. MT saw the opportunity to build on that. “We started to figure out that Milwaukee only likes Milwaukee-style music,” Donno says. “So we tried to adapt. We wanted to create a different style of slap in our music, our own style.”
While Donno doesn’t knock any artists in particular—MT have shared tracks with most of the North Side's big names—he says that Milwaukee rappers are one dimensional. “They got one focus: They like slap music,” he says. “Nobody wants to switch it up. They don’t want to step out of their comfort zone. But me and my brother, every time we make a song we step out of our comfort zone. We're always trying to change things up. Even now, by the time you see us in the summer, we might look completely different again, because we want to stay relevant and stay current. So by the time you think you're used to us, we've switched it.”
That’s meant availing themselves to outside sounds, including pop ones out of step with the harder street styles of their peers. It suits them. Dexxx and Donno sing more than most Milwaukee rappers, and they’re better at it. They also dance, and they do that well, too, which certainly accounts for some of those YouTube views.
But the duo’s more recent whims have taken them away from the youthful bubblegum of their popular early singles like “Tell Me,” “First Love” and “Bae Bae” and toward more reflective and personal material. On their latest album Blue Hearts, they rap about shared joy and shared trauma, documenting the forces that cause kids like them to grow up too fast through the prism of their brotherly bond. On track after track, they highlight how much they’ve been through together, communicating in the shared language that only the closest siblings understand.
“Nobody knows us better than ourselves,” Donno says. “Nobody knows Dexxx more than I know Dexxx. And nobody knows me like Dexxx knows me. So we like to talk about how we came up, and the struggles that we had and the milestones that we’ve accomplished, as well as the problems we go through with our girls. We’ve got a lot of relationship problems.”
Regardless of what they're rapping about, they sell the emotions. “We want people to feel our struggle,” Donno says. “We want people to feel our pain. If you don’t feel how we feel when we’re doing our music, then we’re not doing our jobs. Our relationship problems, we want them to feel like they’re your relationship problems. Us growing up? We want you to feel like it was you growing up doing that. We want you to be in our minds.”
MT are often compared to Rae Sremmurd, for obvious reasons, but those comparisons have grown less apt as the duo’s songwriting has turned heavier and more bittersweet with age. Even Swae Lee has never sang a song as pervasively sad as “Too Many Nights,” a nostalgic account of youth cut short from Blue Hearts. “You hear the pain in my mama’s voice/Ain’t have no heroes so we villains, we didn’t have a fucking choice,” they rap wistfully, on a song that stirs empathy without asking for it. You don’t have to relate to the sentiment to be moved by it.
“I feel like even Rae Sremmurd doesn’t have the bond we do,” Donno says. “Their music is great, but as far as building a bond and telling stories, I feel like we have that one up on them. I don’t think nobody can really explain a story better than twins.”
MT's Blue Hearts is streaming now on Apple Music, Spotify and other streaming platforms. MT’s next EP, Voice of the Youth, is set for release in March.
