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Danny Araneo

Artist Highlight: poptropicaslutz!

From starting out recording demos on free DJ websites, and throwing concerts in grocery store parking lots, the Long Island duo, ‘poptropicaslutz!’ has come a very long way in the past few years. The emerging duo recently released their highly anticipated EP; “just in case the world ends” on May 6th, and are now in the midst of the second leg of their headlining U.S. tour.


The duo was first introduced to each other in high school and released their first single titled “1-800-LUVME” in early 2019, towards the end of their senior year under the personas “yung crawf”(Nick) and “lil jonto”(Christian). Prior to this, they both had been releasing music to SoundCloud on their own, but growth was very minimal. It was until they teamed up to release this first collab single that they noticed a change in response; The record began to gain a bit of a buzz around Long Island as the two started getting recognized at parties and events while gaining some fans through the internet simultaneously. After receiving this reaction, the two decided to join forces and continued to release music as a duo for over a year, but still with no group name.



After a year of minimal growth, the pandemic came along in March of 2020 and had the duo stuck inside their houses with nothing to do other than write music and brainstorm ideas. After a while of brainstorming and trying out new ideas, they began to become inspired by early 2000s emo and punk-rock groups such as ‘Panic! At the Disco’, ‘Fallout Boy’, ‘Senses Fail’, and ‘Blink 182’’. With the combination of their previous inspirations like ‘Juice Wrld’ and ‘xxxtentacion’ the two began to craft a new sound, almost something like a combination of all the above. Soon after finding their sound came the birth of poptropicaslutz!; The name itself was created, the duo had found a team of other creatives to build with, and they were equipped with a manager who ended up starting it all for the rising superstars, it was like everything was coming together all at once.


The duo released their first single under the name poptropicaslutz! on June 26th, 2020 titled “Romeo & Juliet”. The single went on to gain them some of their first real fans and additionally shot an extremely iconic music video with their team that helped gain some traction as well. Keeping the momentum going, their manager, Tim Weber sent hundreds of emails to industry personnel regarding their music and received only one response from Paul Donatelli, of Good Luck Have Fun Records, responding that he was “Mesmerized” by the hook of their unreleased single at the time, ‘I MISS 2007’. Soon after, Good Luck Have Fun went on to sign the single ‘HollywoodHigh16’ in December of 2020. With the help of the label and creative team, the single ended up making it on Spotify’s ‘New Music Friday’ playlist and getting the duo in contact with various labels and music industry personnel. In the midst of all of this was the introduction of the pts! team to Aldrch and Kahre. Kahre reached out to Christian to shoot a video for their upcoming single at the time ‘User Not Found’, and he ended up bringing Aldrch along to the shoot to help with some behind-the-scenes footage. Ever since then, everyone kept in touch and has consistently grown together with the help of Kahre’s impressive visuals and Aldrch’s astounding production; Kahre has now directed 6 additional videos for the duo, while Aldrch has produced countless amount of records, many not yet released.


Fast Forward to 4 months later in April of 2021, the duo is going viral on TikTok for their singles, ‘bad habit’ and ‘grandma got runover by a lawnmower’, receiving over 500k views combined between the two clips. At this point the poptropicaslutz! fanbase had significantly grown, gaining them over 6k followers on Instagram, and increasing their monthly listeners by around 50k. Soon after this, the duo was talking to labels nonstop due to their success on TikTok, but additionally for their image, fan engagement, motivation, and general quality of music. With the creative team consisting of Nick (musician), Christian (musician), Tim (manager/creative director), Danny (designer), and Pablo (photographer), the five were able to create content unlike any other music group their size at the time, with attention-grabbing short films, photos, and merchandise that contributed to increasing their fan engagement and social media presence. After putting in hard work to get labels' attention for years, and months of debating what label they wanted to work with, the duo picked up a new manager, Will Tenney (SunPop Music). They then decided to settle down and sign with Epitaph Records, an independent record label based out of Los Angeles, CA.


Since then, the duo has released 8 singles and their debut EP ‘just incase the world ends’, which led them to begin their tour titled ‘just in case the tour never ends’ that lasts throughout the summer of 2022. Considering that pts! currently has 180k monthly listeners on Spotify and 13k followers on Instagram, their engagement is simply one of a kind, as a diverse fanbase of different genders and age groups form lines of hundreds of people taking up blocks at each show, only to come in, mosh, buy merch, and sing their hearts out to every song. There was even an 8-year-old at one of their past shows on tour;



On July 18th, Emo-trap legend Lil Lotus announced his fall tour with co-headliner ‘Cemetery Sun’, and openers ‘Not A Toy’ and ‘poptropicaslutz!’. With such an exciting upcoming tour, the poptropicaslutz! the duo has plans to only keep this same motivation they’ve had since 2020, and continue riding the momentum to inspire many, and change music forever. The duo has plans to release much more new music for the remainder of the year, but in the meantime check out their recent astounding debut EP below!







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