In a space as crowded as ours, standing out and offering a fresh perspective can at times seem impossible. For every beautiful flower, there are 1,000 people trying to pick at, name and sell it, and as soon as it hits the market. The rest of the players will immediately bite, replicate or bastardize—without their own inspiration or skill. It’s a vicious cycle. In an industry built around a plant that’s supposed to promote creativity, there seems to be an awful lot of cheap copycats falling on their face begging for attention. So what’s the solution? Move with the masses, cater to the lowest common denominator? Of course not. The only acceptable answer here is to constantly innovate, push yourself and to reinvent who the world thinks you are, every damn day if necessary, in order to blaze your own trail—leaving the rest of the world a roadmap to follow. There’s no one in our culture who better exemplifies this solution than the Talking Terps (TT) squad.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 2015, Talking Terps is the expressionist lovechild of Juice, one-third of the cult-classic hip-hop act Flatbush Zombies, PTA HAITI 3000, creator