Subversion certainly sells. And it’s selling everywhere, inundating the public from all angles like never before—sex and the underground and the carefully curated air of exclusivity and the allure of becoming unique through consumption; it’s all on the market table and it’s being devoured at an unbelievable rate. Perhaps it’s because of the joyless corporate neutering of the term “subversive” that makes emcee phenom Julian McCarthy, alias MCR-T, scoff when I ask him if he would qualify his sound as such.

“Subversive? First of all, I wouldn’t say so much about what is said in the tracks. I think we can cut the lyrical aspect from it,” the German-Jamaican-American DJ tells me through a mouthful of french fry. It’s wintertime and he’s on a beach somewhere warm and beautiful because he’s MCR-T and he’s playing everywhere that young people congregate. McCarthy’s viral booty house/ghettotech stylings have dominated post- COVID dancefloors across the globe. The release of rollocking equine project Farm Fantasies with fellow Berliner HorsegiirL in 2022 yielded TikTok cult classic “My Barn My Rules,” and launched McCarthy onto the radars of irony-poisoned internet crowds looking to get a good time on.

We’re talking about the process behind his newest album, NOT THE SAME ≠, which was released in December, and its second iteration that will arrive in May. The album is delightfully catchy; it’s demonstrable of MCR-T’s years spent refining his signature sound, a winking mixture of modern ghettotech, Miami bass, happy hardcore, and everything that makes one’s skin prickle and dopamine centers swell to near-bursting. Tracks like “Here I Cum” offer a moaning loop over bouncy bass: “Listen to the sound, to the sound of me cumming;” where “How To: Getting Up 101” shows McCarthy rapping, jubilant, over breakbeats and broken piano melodies. “Electronic music tracks, conventionally, just work off of buzz words and hooks,” he says. And MCR-T’s buzzwords and hooks are certainly attention-grabbing, his music isn’t predicated on sexual shock value: “[My sound] is really about doing the math, doing the research and dissecting what’s out there, and to find your entrance into what isn’t,” he adds.

McCarthy found that entrance in the mid 2010s, armed with a degree in creative direction, a well-established presence in industrial bunker scenes of Berlin, and an ADHD-induced impulse to explore the limitations of the capital-R Rules. He performed under the now-defunct alias MCNZI (“As an Afro German,” he explained in an earlier interview, “I reserve the right to use that name around people that [wouldn’t do anything] if actual Nazis were there kicking my ass.”) McCarthy joined Live From Earth, a Berlin-based artist collective who got their start reporting live from anti-fascist protests, and put out Fuck You, Play Me in 2019.

In the years since, McCarthy has accrued a significant fanbase made up of club kids and internet newbies alike. Alongside crowd favorite Farm Fantasies, he’s put out seductive hood house project Tootsie Pop with Miss Bashful. He’s a frequent collaborator with Dutch producer Joost Klein; he’s put out raucous club anthems with Australian DJ Partiboi69. Incrementally at first, and then suddenly all at once, MCR-T has become ubiquitous.

MCR-T’s sound, in all of its brash sexuality and swollen hooks, isn’t necessarily a new one— he lands squarely in a lineage of Black and brown producers who made dance music as appealing as it is today. When DJ Assault dropped revolutionary “Ass-N-Tittties” in the Detroit ghettotech heyday, the club scene morphed unto its image. Ghettotech has always been revolutionary, and MCR-T’s scrupulous study and interpretation of it makes his sound all the more appealing. “You know why [Ghettotech] is so popular and will always be popular?” said Keith Tucker, one of the founding members of the Detroit Electro genre, in an interview: “The women like it...The women like to feel sexy and dance to that stuff. Whatever women do, men follow.”

It should come as a surprise to no one that popular interest in the electronic music genre has metastasized in the post-COVID years; that the crowd who was once interested in releasing rap demos on SoundCloud is now saving up to buy a controller; that aged pop princesses are coopting techno aesthetics to refresh lethargic fan base. Techno is and has always been cool—but now, the internet has made it a modicum more accessible, and everyone needs to dance. McCarthy has witnessed this change firsthand:

“I’m sitting here as a recording artist who also does creative direction. This is what I went to college for—creative endeavors. Now, all of a sudden, I’m supposed to be a social media person. You’re beholden to the platforms... Unpopular opinion, and some people would cancel me for it—people who are conventionally undesirable looking have an even tougher time, because you have to be quote-unquote beautiful, quote-unquote hot to even sell your talent, which is fucked up. Your talents should be selling you. Not the other way around.”

He continues, smiling. “So, your job is to look crazy, look good, and get the most attention possible. Next thing you know, we’re going to be having performances where maybe you don’t even have to rep or sing anymore.”

As for audiences, though, who have flocked to shows since the explosive “My Barn My Rules,” McCarthy has very few complaints, “I’ve been blessed so far to have groomed a crowd online who understand what they’re getting into,” he shares. What are crowds getting into, precisely? McCarthy knows, perhaps better than any of his peers. He still goes out to rave, as frequently as possible. “The raving part gives you a sense of where the demand is. I’m a music nerd that still goes to Berghain like three or four times a month. I’m there and I’m doing what everybody else does—dance.”

And, when you’re on the dance floor in the damp hours of the early morning, you want to place your trust in someone who knows better than you do; someone who sees the lack of eroticism in a predatory industry and fights against it by making you sweat. Trust MCR-T in that liminal darkness, to pump your heart for you, for once; to clench the right muscles; to shift your weight from leg to leg. Let a subwoofer anesthetize the brain while McCarthy controls your body.

Tickets to MCR-T's NOT THE SAME ≠ PART 2 launch party can be found here

Photographed by Nat Gray

Styled by Chad Serrano

Written and Produced by Annie Bush

Grooming: Leibi Carias

Styling Assistant: Ronnel Natalie

Production Assistant: Kayla Hardy

Location: Gjelina Hotel