Ovrkast Breaks Down 12 Perfectly Produced Rap Beats

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production.

If you took every Ovrkast song and stacked their waveforms next to each other, they would create a schematic for personal progress. Each project the Bay Area-raised rapper-producer has dropped since 2020’s Try Again teems with the energy and self-awareness to make it to the next level of life—it’s all right there in the title of his debut. Much of his early work crawls with the anxiety and second-guesses natural in your late teens and early 20s, the kind stared down and overcome in coming-of-age movies from Juice to Superbad. As a producer, he’s always shown supreme skill for placing the right hard-hitting drums over the right melancholy sample loops, and his horizons have expanded in ever-wilder directions in the last few years. You’d never guess the guy behind songs like “2 Minute Bars” and “Church” would rap over anything as raucous as what he and Cardo Got Wings cooked up on 2024’s Kast Got Wings, but he’s one of several young spitters who’ve proven that being scrappy and malleable is the way for indie rap to evolve.

While the Iron Is Hot, his first full-length album in five years after a handful of EPs, is his strongest and most varied project yet. Kast isn’t the lil bro hoping it all shakes out anymore; he’s a clear-eyed double threat on the mic and the boards. He makes samples and instruments float around the room on “Truth?” and “New Era,” and floors it for the frenetic drum break and horns of lead single “Small Talk.” On “Mavkast” and “Strange Ways,” he goes toe-to-toe with Mavi and Vince Staples, two of the best rappers alive, and leaves not only unscathed, but with a few good licks of his own. The energy he’s putting out is enough to power the Oakland block he was raised on, and it’s all come from trusting himself through it all.

“I learned how to be resourceful and play on recurring themes and audio motifs,” he says, confirming that many of Iron’s beats were made with the same palette of sounds, recycled and reinterpreted several times over. “And I learned how to be in my typical Ovrkast world, but also draw from different places, and how to make that meld the right way.” 

Below, Ovrkast discusses a dozen rap beats that have inspired him as a producer, from genre mainstays like J Dilla, Madlib, and Alchemist, to undervalued stalwarts like Phoelix and Denmark Vessey.