Creating music together for nearly a decade now, TiRon & Ayomari find themselves entering the most confident and self-aware phase of their musical alliance with the release of their new album, WET: The Wonderful Ego Trip.

Both California transplants (TiRon via Illinois and Ayomari via Georgia) who interestingly met while showcasing their creative efforts on Yahoo! Chat and linked up in Los Angeles while pursuing solo careers. They eventually set aside their individual musical avenues to combine forces and spawn a substantially more powerful product.

Undefined by a specific genre, their sound is a combination of Hip-Hop, R&B, and Indie Rock. The duo demanded recognition with their 2011 concept album, A Sucker For Pumps. It explored the ebbs and flows of a romantic relationship and followed that up four years later with the widely praised, The Great New Wonderful in 2015. With two esteemed LPs and the added public praises of both Q-Tip and Puff Daddy, it was this third major project that was wildly anticipated by anyone familiar with the pair.

With the unexpected passing of their new manager, Dominique Trenier (who also managed D’Angelo and Mark Ronson), paired with frustrations among some their relationships with the perceived decision makers in the music industry, both TiRon & Ayomari felt adrift from the intended business-sided path at hand. Ultimately though, what was a deeply disheartening period for the twosome, ended up becoming the fuel that lit the fire behind WET: The Wonderful Ego Trip’s creative process. While Great New Wonderful was a project dedicated to grasping the simple joys of life, their new offering challenges the listener (and themselves) to come to terms with both your own and your neighbor’s shortcomings, false pride, fear, and inevitable failures.

The pair explained their thought process within the construction of this album by conveying, “Just looking the devil in the face. Not only do we as humans have to at some point, but we as a country have to, we as a planet have to. We have to look at the evils and the negative of who we are, and deal with it,” they said in a commentary. “The more that we sweep it under the rug, the more that we hide it, the stronger it gets. So this WET album is really about that. Engage with that negative side. Come to terms with it…Everybody is going through ego-tripping in some capacity, and it’s all connected.”

Throughout WET: The Wonderful Ego Trip TiRon & Ayomari refreshingly touch on everything. This includes dangers of technology and social media, where being so connected actually designs a reality where we are more disconnected from human feeling than ever before (“Airplane Mode”), to the internalized pressure of fitting in via substances (“Everyone’s Doing It”), vile machismo (“Chivalry Is Dead”), fraudulence within the industry (“2 Petty”), artificial friendships and demanding honesty from your circle (“Ffake Ffrends”), to the power of belief in thyself (“Superhug”).

Celebrated Author, Steven Pressfield, once wrote in The War of Art – “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” TiRon & Ayomari’s WET: The Wonderful Ego Trip encompasses that exact notion, and urges you to embrace the surrounding weaknesses and angst in your life, and manifest them into awareness and an authentic self-confidence.

While the duo mentioned earlier this year that WET would be their final album together, TiRon comically explained earlier this month, that in-line with the narrative of the album, that talk “Was just ego-tripping”. TiRon & Ayomari have confirmed they will tour in 2018 and that WET: The Wonderful Ego Trip will simply be another chapter in their ongoing and introspective audible catalog.

Photograph by Ed Canas.

#BonusBeat: The music video for “It’s A Trip”:

This featured in Ambrosia For Heads’“Ready Or Not” series .