We are all keeping an eye on gas prices. But for an independent artist on a DIY tour, when the number at the same station jumps from $3.60 to $4.40 inside a week, it cuts a little deeper. Khary has been watching that math from behind the wheel, driving himself from show to show. The math doesn’t work in his favor, but Khary has decided the math is not the point. The point is being in the room, sharing energy with the fan base he has built over the last decade. “I need to go see my people. It’s a great feeling making fans online, and you turn out to be who they think you are.”
His 2016 breakout mixtape Intern Aquarium documented a 21-year-old college dropout grinding through unpaid internships, couch-hopping across New York, writing in a loft too low to stand up in. That patience and dedication never faded. A decade later, Khary is still paving his own lane.
Right now, that lane is leading to a record called Alpha Male Podcast. The title does not need to be explained, which is part of the point. He calls it “an important project for the guys,” and one he felt called to make. Alpha Male Podcast is an “honest, critical, satirical, and affirming” examination of what being a man is right now. The goal is reaching some understanding of why these online male spaces are popping up, and why they exist in the first place. The people defining that conversation are mostly doing it on podcast couches and Twitch clips. Khary wanted it to live somewhere else.
The album’s first two singles mark the poles of the territory he is mapping. “Horse Sh*t” plays the obsessed version of the man, the one in too deep. “Can’t Take Anymore” plays the opposite, the one too checked out to feel any of it. Read together, it’s a timeline. Read separately, two sides of the same coin. “I’ve mixed so much of myself into these songs,” he says. The album earns its 360-degree examination because he has lived 360 degrees of it. He traces the impulse back to a 2018 breakup. He didn’t go to his older brothers. One of them had always just naturally gotten girls. He opened YouTube instead, typed in “how to get over an ex,” and fell into a corner of the internet he hadn’t known existed. Alpha Male Podcast may be the end of that rabbit hole.
Staying in it that long is consistent with how he works. The throughline of Khary’s career is patience. He is patient with the outcome because to him, art is never really done. “Deep Conversations,” a track he dropped in 2022, went viral in 2024, two full years after release. It was good. It was meaningful. And he never stopped talking about it. That is the model. He has posted more than a hundred videos for “Big Man,” another song that lands on the new album, and he is not done with it. “I think songs are forever,” he says. “If they mean something to you, you don’t get tired of promoting it, and it’ll find its audience when it needs to.” In an era where artists abandon a song the week it underperforms, Khary refuses. He moves on from the release date. He does not move on from the song.
That patience extends past the music too. Four years ago, Khary picked up skating again, after a stretch where he felt like he didn’t have any hobbies. He hurt his wrist so onthe morning of our interview. “Picking up skating was like reconnecting with someone I lost,” he says. The practice became a kind of meditation, a puzzle he solves with his body. The culture spoke to him too, because the culture knows what it is. “Skating is a unique counter culture in that it has rules that protect and maintain its core,” he says. “It’s sometimes gatekeepy, for the better of the culture.” Skating also opened him up to other people who have just figured themselves out. One of them is Dan Corrigan, a mid-30s YouTube skater Khary stumbled into in LA. Corrigan skates with whoever, documents what he does, and does it all because he loves it. As Khary puts it, “To age gracefully doing what you love is where it’s at. It’s the ultimate goal.”
He has been working on that for years. Intern Aquarium just turned ten. The 2016 mixtape was a staple of a remarkable era in hip-hop, and the project that put him on. It is also the one he had to live inside of for a decade. “There was a time I felt like I was living in its shadow,” he reflects. The comments still tell him to go back to it. He is not that kid anymore. He has evolved past the version of himself that wanted to grind his way to the top, but in a lot of ways, Khary still feels like that intern. If you feel far from a goal, put on Intern Aquarium. It is a top-notch, nostalgic soundtrack for the way there. The project plays like a battle between the production and the rapping. They escalate each other, push boundaries, and both come out on top. It is definitely worth revisiting before the show.
Khary plays The Black Buzzard in Denver on June 20, with Jordan Burgett, ReSrface, and Ason Yugen on the bill. No matter how high gas prices get, he will be in the room. You should be there too. Get tickets at theblackbuzzard.com.
