Baby Swag EP released by Zed Kenzo on April 5, 2019.
Zed Kenzo has been in Austin for less than 24 hours and her schedule is already completely booked up for South by Southwest. “It all starts tomorrow. I might be doing... five performances?” she says over the phone with a bit of uncertainty, and then laughs. This includes the showcase at Austin’s divey Barracuda featuring fellow artists and grant recipients of Milwaukee’s Backline music and mentorship program, such as Lex Allen and Crystal Knives. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this many shows back to back,” Kenzo says.
Zechariah Ruffin, aka Zed Kenzo, was born and raised in Milwaukee. She grew up in different parts of the city’s North Side—18th and Cortland, 50th and Villard, Seventh and Vienna—but references the area near 26th and Chambers streets as being a significant part of her upbringing. “That’s where my granny lived,” says Kenzo. “She pretty much helped raise me.”
The soundtrack to her childhood consisted of R&B staples like Sade, SWV and Anita Baker, along with West Coast rappers like Tupac and Ice Cube. “There was a lot of music in the house. It was never quiet. And then with my grandma, [there was] a little Motown and soul music,” she says. Ruffin began writing songs and fantasizing about performing as early as fifth grade. “I always knew that was what I wanted to do, be an entertainer in some light,” she professes.
Around the age of 12, Ruffin began to venture outside of the familiar and became drawn to the music from bands like Nirvana and System of a Down, and later (during her high-school years) to the frenetic pace of post-hardcore and bands found on the Warped Tour circuit. “I discovered rock and was like ‘Oh, this is different!’ I never listened to that in my house.”
2019 marks the much-anticipated “return” of one of Milwaukee’s most standout futuristic hip-hop artists. Although Zed Kenzo never stopped making music and never really went away, give her name a quick Google search and you’ll find that there aren’t a lot of traces left of the music she released before the start of this year, save for the material preserved via live footage of past shows in Milwaukee and Chicago, here and there.
“As far as my old music not being up anymore—it was old,” Kenzo says. “I wanted to wipe the slate clean and come into the new year with new stuff. I had the leeway to be able to do that because I hadn’t released anything in so long. It just worked out perfectly.” Around the time Zed Kenzo was awarded the Backline grant, she had already spent some time in the studio recording a completely different project, which ended up being put aside. “A new wave kind of came over me,” she says. “I kind of just threw away all those songs I had been recording and wrote a bunch of new stuff.”
And of course, it was entirely worth the wait.
Throughout the Baby Swag EP, released this month, Zed Kenzo traverses across time and various genres effortlessly while holding onto her otherworldly sound, all in just 16 minutes. Take the EP’s first single, the high-energy rager “Type” (along with its companion video directed by Wes Tank), and songs like “Fresh” and “Small Talk,” which boast Kenzo’s signature stream of consciousness and rapid-fire lyrical wit. On the trash metal-like “Immortal” and “Machete,” we see Kenzo level up into full-on video-game villain mode with lines like “Olvidastes soy el jefe / Bitch, I got that fuego / shining from my head down to my toes / Kill it like I’m Terminator / watch me explode” before balancing it all out with the dream pop-tinged “Melancholic Shorty.”
When asked about what the future holds, she says that she’s not planning on slowing down anytime soon. “I’m just trying to be consistent,” she says. “That’s kind of the whole goal right now—being consistent and putting out music that’s good and that people like. People seem to be really happy, excited, supportive and eager to hear what I have next. It just makes me want to work even more.”
