RAY OTW crafts the kind of music that old heads have been mourning for years.
Tucked away in Melbourne’s CBD, the producer/artist draws upon the classics: D’Angelo, Aaliyah, and H-Town. Our newest Independent Artist of the Week, RAY OTW chatted with Ify on Up For It about his love for sampling and deep R&B cuts.
“There’s a lot of sample digging, for sure. I just listened to a lot of records that I love and gravitate towards. It’s always been R&B, but it can kind of go anywhere...”
The pull is magnetic between RAY OTW and his choice of samples. His debut mixtape, HARANA, (released under previous alias SON RAY) shows flair; through sampling, reinterpreting someone else's words to tell his own story – without revealing too much, of course. It’s like when you first start talking to someone so you start posting songs on your story, hoping they’ll indirectly get the hint you’re feeling them. It’s up to you if you wanna hit the 2-step or read inbetween the chops and bootlegs to discover more.
Since HARANA, RAY OTW has continued to flex his producer and artist muscles, with collaborative albums with fellow Melbourne rappers and good friends – Chef Chung on Smile, We Have Each Other, and Sevn Aguarda on STATE CORP NEXUS, both combining adorations of rap and soul. You can sense a mutual respect for one another's art: the producer and artist going all out on each track, but not so much that one overpowers the other.
“I feel like all my collaborations are like this, but they’re always made natural, you know. Every artist I work with kind of tends to be a friend first before anything, and then, from that, it’s always sonically aligned.”
Continuing what now appears to be a RAY OTW tradition, two years on from HARANA’s release he returned on Valentines Day 2025 to drop a double single, DON&JULIO. Two tracks that echo the sparkly, satin R&B of HARANA, but also carry the recent experience of his expanded sound.
“Sonically, they’re [the albums] quite different but they all have the same kind of essence of me…I think it was just naturally expressing a sort of range that I have musically … the stuff I’m making now is definitely an evolution and a refinement of those things.”
Words by Tiana Severino-Fidow