When asked if he always knew he’d end up being a rapper, Benjamin Laub—better known as Grieves—can only laugh. “Oh no, not really,” he says, “I was in bands and stuff, but I grew up listening mainly to Punk stuff. It wasn’t until I got a little older that Hip-Hop really started to happen for me.” When Grieves first heard artists like Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang Clan, he remembers being drawn to their sound. “Hearing all the samples and stuff from records that I heard my dad play when I was a kid… You start to hear the connections. When I discovered people like Atmosphere, it was like hearing somebody speak their truth in a way that related to me. That’s when I first started to think about Hip-Hop as a way to really talk about what was happening in my life. Hard to believe that now, over a decade later, that’s actually what I’m still doing.”
