Our story begins on YouTube nearly two years ago. The amusing, if not wholesome footage of a dap with a clerk at a gas station, followed by the flurried footage of a night drive. I’m describing the music video for “Rod Kimble,” one of the first standout singles of Dream Caster (@realdreamcaster), or as he’s perhaps more widely known, Woody.

Released in July 2021, the visual template for Rod Kimble may seem like it’s been done before: an early-20s white rapper, clad with tattoos and messy brown hair, smoking a blunt, championing Moncler and B.B. Simon belts. But Woody’s vocal style and beat selection are anything but typical. Arranged around somber acoustic chords, Woody’s catchy delivery on the song is the perfect introduction to his discography: a radical, ambitious infusion of gothic and emo aesthetics with plugg, a now-pervasive genre recently popularized in the SoundCloud scene.

Dream Caster belongs to a pioneering collective of artists known as Shed Theory with roots throughout New England. Perhaps the best known from the group is Joeyy (@jxxyy), who has risen to viral fame from the pantheon of memes concerning his appearance and style, and who recently came under management from Nextel (@nextel). Nextel, who formerly managed Yeat and practically turned him into a household name, has also grown close to Marlon DuBois (@chewychips), another rising member within Shed. In fact, as its de facto founder, Marlon has the key to the eponymous ‘shed’: a single room outfitted with a studio setup, located at Marlon’s family home in New York. The shed was the launching pad for many of the group’s early songs together and traces the development of their artistry. Shed Theory as a collective thus represents the unique merging between physical and digital modes of creation that has very lately defined underground music, while also simply being a distinctive moniker for a group of close friends.

Shortly after I found out about Joeyy a couple of years ago, I began to dissect the project that is the Shed. One of the more elusive and incomprehensible on social media was Dream Caster, and after the release of his eponymous first album woody in February 2022, I quickly became a fan. Woody’s esoteric online presence was contrasted by his open reception of fans. He responded to my direct messages and was always grateful for support. Last fall, I was lucky enough to meet Woody in L.A. for a show featuring the whole of Shed (sans Henry Mosto and Facy) in addition to several other staples of the underground: RXK Nephew, BBY Goyard, even Matt Ox. Not only was he a lively performer, blasting “Steven Tyler'' and chanting his first anthem “Ugly,” he was both intriguing and perceptive in conversation. But he was reserved - not quite shy - and I could tell that he had a ton of ideas swirling in his head.

In March of this year, I reached out to Woody with a few questions to better understand his work and goals. Without revealing too much, he made me even more interested in his influences and the progression of his style.

Woody says the name “Dream Caster” was a simple decision - it rings out as a fantasy camp name. It’s a persona that comports with his mystical, if not otherworldly brand of plugg. The first concert that he went to growing up was Big D and the Kids Table, a late 90s ska punk band. His favorite music group is hard to choose, but Converge (a fantastic metalcore band) was the front-runner when I asked. When prompted with the question of the modification of My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge cover for his project My Favorite Kill, he states it was for his “swag.”

This does not sound like the average profile of a rapper who found his roots on SoundCloud, and that is exactly the point. Woody’s varied musical interests and background growing up provided the basis for his experimentation, his vocals ranging much closer to alt metal than rap. He cites his biggest influences as Mitch Lucker and Joey Jordison, the former the late vocalist of Suicide Silence, one of Woody’s other favorite bands, and the latter the pioneering drummer of Slipknot (known as #1). Often paired with the melodic influences of groove metal, Lucker’s insane vocal distortions almost made screamo sound rhythmic, like rapping. On the other hand, Jordison was particularly effective at elevating the persona and public image of Slipknot, a cue Woody has taken in his oft-psychotic and purposefully delirious Internet presence. Yet Woody doesn’t label himself in any one direction, and he said that explicitly. When I prodded him about how his vocal style has progressed, he responded it’s “just my voice.”

That’s not to say he wasn’t inspired by those who came before him - he utilizes many of the sonic devices provided by figures such as Bladee and Black Kray, their cloud rap, introverted delivery and gothic subject matter seeping into his drugged-out encapsulation of the raw energy found within metal. A curious coincidence, Woody grew up in Westfield, MA, which shares its name with a popular song off Bladee’s album Red Light. Bladee’s discography was incredibly impactful on Joeyy and other members of Shed early on, but their new brand of ambient trap has severed itself from any identifiable inspiration. Woody lies at the center of this paradigm, one of the few underground artists today willing to integrate archaic, if not utterly nostalgic, 2000s metal aesthetics into the various new directions underground rap is taking.

One of my favorite songs by Woody is “Steven Tyler,” which was released on the Fetch EP several months after woody. The infectious chorus lays Woody’s dark, disaffected voice bare, with minimalist lyrics that convey his persona.

“I got a lot to say…

I just got better, please don’t come my way…

I feel like Steven Tyler, how he walk this way..

And yes I’m booted up, why I talk this way.”

The instrumental for Steven Tyler coincidentally reminds me of “Friday Nite”, an older collaboration between Bladee and Black Kray. Both songs are emblematic of Woody and Kray’s experimentation with their voice, their melancholic chanting illustrating scenes of pill popping, lost love - the struggle that inevitably comes before the shine. It would be possible to conflate their styles, as a user on Reddit did below, but to do so would be to admit you haven’t really listened to Dream Caster.

When I asked if he had heard Friday Nite, Woody said he hadn’t, and while he clearly draws from Black Kray, that inspiration has merely driven his sui generis style further into its own lane. Woody’s beat selection tends to trend glitchier, his lyricism is far more self-deprecating, and his live performance style much more hectic.

My Favorite Kill marked Woody’s further thematic movement towards emo and goth, an EP that felt as if it could serve as the soundtrack for a teenage romance where someone tragically dies at the end. Truly conceptual in nature, the tape kicks off with police sirens and Woody muttering on “Keep Away,” introducing some of his most intricate vocal inflections. After that, “Jane & Jesse” bursts on with an extremely catchy hook on a bitcrushed plugg backdrop, a single released before the EP that has since become Woody’s most popular solo track.

But the tape gets even more ambitious. On “Baby If We’re Going Down,” Woody’s low tones rumble in parallel to the hypnotic 808, complemented by an addictive hi-hat pattern. The song is a daring, but effective, bridge between the former track and “Heaven,” one of Woody’s most heartfelt songs.

“And I don’t care what you’ve been on,

And I can smell the cheap wine and perfume,

And I spent last night, so over you

Every soldier guards heaven, o-oh,

But not all can make it.”

The pure affect of “Heaven” epitomizes Woody’s style, his ability to turn a single hook into an ear-catching chorus that you want to scream at the top of your lungs. It’s hard not to label My Favorite Kill Woody’s magnum opus thus far - its replete with the Y2K influences of mainstream emo bands while sounding like an entirely new, hard-hitting, emotional edition of pluggnb. Tongue in cheek, Woody even recently branded his style “lispnb” on Twitter - a stylization that accounts for the uniqueness of his voice, and leaves the rest to mystery.

https://twitter.com/real1woody/status/1677483348325720066?s=20

With or without the figures borrowed from Three Cheers, on this tape Woody truly formulated his own class of heartbreak, complete with the maniacally scribbled titles of a would-be psycho. It’s a massive aesthetic accomplishment that Woody can sound as menacing as he does while simultaneously making it seem as if he could break down at any moment.

Waiting for My Favorite Kill last fall was an exciting journey, particularly because it coincided with “Dream Caster” becoming much more well known: Shed released their first full-length album, Lurch Theory, and Woody went on a run of singles that brought greater attention to his discography. When I met up with Wood in Los Angeles, I had heard many of the snippets that would become the leading songs off the tape, but the official release of My Favorite Kill several months later solidified my eagerness to document his progression as a musician.

The hype was mounting for another full-length project, and on February 24th, Woody dropped Book of Wood, a 10-song album furthering his experimental pedigree. From his angsty delivery on “Fable,” to his selection of the Ripsquad-esque beat for “Black and White,” the album was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard. Woody’s self-deprecating lyrics are tinged with a more forceful, psychotic tone - “Opiates on my cell phone,” while the tag “Hit them with the fentanyl” appears several times on “iPhone.” To take it even further, the final track on Book of Wood echoes the alternative rock pieces that reverberate on nearly every Dream Caster project; but here, with the addition of Marlon, Woody moves it up a notch, crooning over a post-punk instrumental. It feels like the transition track to a full-blown live instrument metal project, Woody’s barking taking center stage, its own kind of peculiar instrument.

“There’s not much left of me,

I’ll take what’s left of you,

I keep you in my bag,

at least what’s left of you.”

In very little time, Woody has established an impressively varied collection of mixtapes and singles, borrowing from the dominance of plugg but increasingly positioning his persona towards a complex synthesis of metal and alternative. He’s taken the seeds planted in the past two decades by such pivotal figures as Bladee, Black Kray, and indeed his idol Mitch Lucker to push the envelope of underground rap forward. While his work may be an acquired taste, it has an aura of raw emotion that I don’t think anyone else from the hyper-online SoundCloud era has come close to invoking.

What’s better is that Woody’s involvement with Shed Theory has been mutualistic, and the creativity of Shed seems to effervescently flow between its members. With Joeyy’s ascent - both in meme echo chambers and on streaming charts - Shed as a group will continue to shape the paths of the most off-the-wall sounds in the underground. Meme culture has embraced their distinctive, if not ironic, aesthetics and the caricatures of Joeyy, Marlon, and Laker have only proven to increase their publicity. Combined with the sonic humor of DJ Smokey’s viral nuke tags (who also hosted Woody’s recent collab tape with Acid Souljah, Acidcaster) and the stewardship of Nextel, it’s clear that Shed will be much more familiar to the average listener in no time at all.

What’s next for Woody? After taking the stage with Joeyy at Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash 2023, he embarks on a Joeyy & Shed nationwide tour this summer. Continuing to release singles, Woody has paved the way for non-rap genres to intervene on the prevailing sounds in the ever-expanding underground. I look forward to seeing him, and the rest of Shed, in Chicago on August 6th. I hope that you, too, will be able to get a ticket for Shed’s first trip across the United States - I have a feeling it will be a momentous occasion.

“And I think I’m someone, but I’m no one,” - Dream Caster, “Heaven”

Thanks for reading this piece! Follow me on Instagram @pluggvision for updates on what’s coming next. If you want to support further work, feel free to contribute to my ENS address on Ethereum, deanblunt.eth. Please support Woody @realdreamcaster on Instagram and check out his newest music video, “did not did” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHaJMRfNBM4. 

Our story begins on YouTube nearly two years ago. The amusing, if not wholesome footage of a dap with a clerk at a gas station, followed by the flurried footage of a night drive. I’m describing the music video for “Rod Kimble,” one of the first standout singles of Dream Caster (@realdreamcaster), or as he’s perhaps more widely known, Woody.

Released in July 2021, the visual template for Rod Kimble may seem like it’s been done before: an early-20s white rapper, clad with tattoos and messy brown hair, smoking a blunt, championing Moncler and B.B. Simon belts. But Woody’s vocal style and beat selection are anything but typical. Arranged around somber acoustic chords, Woody’s catchy delivery on the song is the perfect introduction to his discography: a radical, ambitious infusion of gothic and emo aesthetics with plugg, a now-pervasive genre recently popularized in the SoundCloud scene.

Dream Caster belongs to a pioneering collective of artists known as Shed Theory with roots throughout New England. Perhaps the best known from the group is Joeyy (@jxxyy), who has risen to viral fame from the pantheon of memes concerning his appearance and style, and who recently came under management from Nextel (@nextel). Nextel, who formerly managed Yeat and practically turned him into a household name, has also grown close to Marlon DuBois (@chewychips), another rising member within Shed. In fact, as its de facto founder, Marlon has the key to the eponymous ‘shed’: a single room outfitted with a studio setup, located at Marlon’s family home in New York. The shed was the launching pad for many of the group’s early songs together and traces the development of their artistry. Shed Theory as a collective thus represents the unique merging between physical and digital modes of creation that has very lately defined underground music, while also simply being a distinctive moniker for a group of close friends.

Shortly after I found out about Joeyy a couple of years ago, I began to dissect the project that is the Shed. One of the more elusive and incomprehensible on social media was Dream Caster, and after the release of his eponymous first album woody in February 2022, I quickly became a fan. Woody’s esoteric online presence was contrasted by his open reception of fans. He responded to my direct messages and was always grateful for support. Last fall, I was lucky enough to meet Woody in L.A. for a show featuring the whole of Shed (sans Henry Mosto and Facy) in addition to several other staples of the underground: RXK Nephew, BBY Goyard, even Matt Ox. Not only was he a lively performer, blasting “Steven Tyler'' and chanting his first anthem “Ugly,” he was both intriguing and perceptive in conversation. But he was reserved - not quite shy - and I could tell that he had a ton of ideas swirling in his head.

In March of this year, I reached out to Woody with a few questions to better understand his work and goals. Without revealing too much, he made me even more interested in his influences and the progression of his style.

Woody says the name “Dream Caster” was a simple decision - it rings out as a fantasy camp name. It’s a persona that comports with his mystical, if not otherworldly brand of plugg. The first concert that he went to growing up was Big D and the Kids Table, a late 90s ska punk band. His favorite music group is hard to choose, but Converge (a fantastic metalcore band) was the front-runner when I asked. When prompted with the question of the modification of My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge cover for his project My Favorite Kill, he states it was for his “swag.”

This does not sound like the average profile of a rapper who found his roots on SoundCloud, and that is exactly the point. Woody’s varied musical interests and background growing up provided the basis for his experimentation, his vocals ranging much closer to alt metal than rap. He cites his biggest influences as Mitch Lucker and Joey Jordison, the former the late vocalist of Suicide Silence, one of Woody’s other favorite bands, and the latter the pioneering drummer of Slipknot (known as #1). Often paired with the melodic influences of groove metal, Lucker’s insane vocal distortions almost made screamo sound rhythmic, like rapping. On the other hand, Jordison was particularly effective at elevating the persona and public image of Slipknot, a cue Woody has taken in his oft-psychotic and purposefully delirious Internet presence. Yet Woody doesn’t label himself in any one direction, and he said that explicitly. When I prodded him about how his vocal style has progressed, he responded it’s “just my voice.”

That’s not to say he wasn’t inspired by those who came before him - he utilizes many of the sonic devices provided by figures such as Bladee and Black Kray, their cloud rap, introverted delivery and gothic subject matter seeping into his drugged-out encapsulation of the raw energy found within metal. A curious coincidence, Woody grew up in Westfield, MA, which shares its name with a popular song off Bladee’s album Red Light. Bladee’s discography was incredibly impactful on Joeyy and other members of Shed early on, but their new brand of ambient trap has severed itself from any identifiable inspiration. Woody lies at the center of this paradigm, one of the few underground artists today willing to integrate archaic, if not utterly nostalgic, 2000s metal aesthetics into the various new directions underground rap is taking.

One of my favorite songs by Woody is “Steven Tyler,” which was released on the Fetch EP several months after woody. The infectious chorus lays Woody’s dark, disaffected voice bare, with minimalist lyrics that convey his persona.

“I got a lot to say…

I just got better, please don’t come my way…

I feel like Steven Tyler, how he walk this way..

And yes I’m booted up, why I talk this way.”

The instrumental for Steven Tyler coincidentally reminds me of “Friday Nite”, an older collaboration between Bladee and Black Kray. Both songs are emblematic of Woody and Kray’s experimentation with their voice, their melancholic chanting illustrating scenes of pill popping, lost love - the struggle that inevitably comes before the shine. It would be possible to conflate their styles, as a user on Reddit did below, but to do so would be to admit you haven’t really listened to Dream Caster.

When I asked if he had heard Friday Nite, Woody said he hadn’t, and while he clearly draws from Black Kray, that inspiration has merely driven his sui generis style further into its own lane. Woody’s beat selection tends to trend glitchier, his lyricism is far more self-deprecating, and his live performance style much more hectic.

My Favorite Kill marked Woody’s further thematic movement towards emo and goth, an EP that felt as if it could serve as the soundtrack for a teenage romance where someone tragically dies at the end. Truly conceptual in nature, the tape kicks off with police sirens and Woody muttering on “Keep Away,” introducing some of his most intricate vocal inflections. After that, “Jane & Jesse” bursts on with an extremely catchy hook on a bitcrushed plugg backdrop, a single released before the EP that has since become Woody’s most popular solo track.

But the tape gets even more ambitious. On “Baby If We’re Going Down,” Woody’s low tones rumble in parallel to the hypnotic 808, complemented by an addictive hi-hat pattern. The song is a daring, but effective, bridge between the former track and “Heaven,” one of Woody’s most heartfelt songs.

“And I don’t care what you’ve been on,

And I can smell the cheap wine and perfume,

And I spent last night, so over you

Every soldier guards heaven, o-oh,

But not all can make it.”

The pure affect of “Heaven” epitomizes Woody’s style, his ability to turn a single hook into an ear-catching chorus that you want to scream at the top of your lungs. It’s hard not to label My Favorite Kill Woody’s magnum opus thus far - its replete with the Y2K influences of mainstream emo bands while sounding like an entirely new, hard-hitting, emotional edition of pluggnb. Tongue in cheek, Woody even recently branded his style “lispnb” on Twitter - a stylization that accounts for the uniqueness of his voice, and leaves the rest to mystery.

https://twitter.com/real1woody/status/1677483348325720066?s=20

With or without the figures borrowed from Three Cheers, on this tape Woody truly formulated his own class of heartbreak, complete with the maniacally scribbled titles of a would-be psycho. It’s a massive aesthetic accomplishment that Woody can sound as menacing as he does while simultaneously making it seem as if he could break down at any moment.

Waiting for My Favorite Kill last fall was an exciting journey, particularly because it coincided with “Dream Caster” becoming much more well known: Shed released their first full-length album, Lurch Theory, and Woody went on a run of singles that brought greater attention to his discography. When I met up with Wood in Los Angeles, I had heard many of the snippets that would become the leading songs off the tape, but the official release of My Favorite Kill several months later solidified my eagerness to document his progression as a musician.

The hype was mounting for another full-length project, and on February 24th, Woody dropped Book of Wood, a 10-song album furthering his experimental pedigree. From his angsty delivery on “Fable,” to his selection of the Ripsquad-esque beat for “Black and White,” the album was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard. Woody’s self-deprecating lyrics are tinged with a more forceful, psychotic tone - “Opiates on my cell phone,” while the tag “Hit them with the fentanyl” appears several times on “iPhone.” To take it even further, the final track on Book of Wood echoes the alternative rock pieces that reverberate on nearly every Dream Caster project; but here, with the addition of Marlon, Woody moves it up a notch, crooning over a post-punk instrumental. It feels like the transition track to a full-blown live instrument metal project, Woody’s barking taking center stage, its own kind of peculiar instrument.

“There’s not much left of me,

I’ll take what’s left of you,

I keep you in my bag,

at least what’s left of you.”

In very little time, Woody has established an impressively varied collection of mixtapes and singles, borrowing from the dominance of plugg but increasingly positioning his persona towards a complex synthesis of metal and alternative. He’s taken the seeds planted in the past two decades by such pivotal figures as Bladee, Black Kray, and indeed his idol Mitch Lucker to push the envelope of underground rap forward. While his work may be an acquired taste, it has an aura of raw emotion that I don’t think anyone else from the hyper-online SoundCloud era has come close to invoking.

What’s better is that Woody’s involvement with Shed Theory has been mutualistic, and the creativity of Shed seems to effervescently flow between its members. With Joeyy’s ascent - both in meme echo chambers and on streaming charts - Shed as a group will continue to shape the paths of the most off-the-wall sounds in the underground. Meme culture has embraced their distinctive, if not ironic, aesthetics and the caricatures of Joeyy, Marlon, and Laker have only proven to increase their publicity. Combined with the sonic humor of DJ Smokey’s viral nuke tags (who also hosted Woody’s recent collab tape with Acid Souljah, Acidcaster) and the stewardship of Nextel, it’s clear that Shed will be much more familiar to the average listener in no time at all.

What’s next for Woody? After taking the stage with Joeyy at Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash 2023, he embarks on a Joeyy & Shed nationwide tour this summer. Continuing to release singles, Woody has paved the way for non-rap genres to intervene on the prevailing sounds in the ever-expanding underground. I look forward to seeing him, and the rest of Shed, in Chicago on August 6th. I hope that you, too, will be able to get a ticket for Shed’s first trip across the United States - I have a feeling it will be a momentous occasion.

“And I think I’m someone, but I’m no one,” - Dream Caster, “Heaven”

Thanks for reading this piece! Follow me on Instagram @pluggvision for updates on what’s coming next. If you want to support further work, feel free to contribute to my ENS address on Ethereum, deanblunt.eth. Please support Woody @realdreamcaster on Instagram and check out his newest music video, “did not did” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHaJMRfNBM4.