DX began as a pile of rejects. In 2012 Top Dawg Entertainment asked the East Bay duo Friendzone for beats while Kendrick Lamar was assembling good kid, m.A.A.d city. What James Laurence and Dylan Reznick sent back was too strange for that record, leaving them a folder of instrumentals with nowhere to go. Then A$AP Rocky's "Fashion Killa", which they co-produced, landed on Long.Live.A$AP in January 2013 and became the pair's first major-label placement. Rather than cash in, they went back to the orphaned tracks, rewrote most of them, and put the result on Bandcamp on 9 October 2013 for whatever people felt like paying.
That contrarian streak was there from the start. Laurence and Reznick met in 2005 in the Bay Area noise scene, Laurence running a project called doe, Reznick playing in a band named Robin Williams on Fire. They spent years in a noise-pop outfit, Destroy Tokyo, before a Main Attrakionz video pulled them toward rap. Two beats on that Oakland duo's 808s & Dark Grapes II in 2011, "Chuch" and "Perfect Skies", put them at the centre of what was being called cloud rap, the hazy, dissociated style Clams Casino and Lil B had opened up. Collection I, released in 2012, filled in the picture: producers who swapped dusty loops for glassy synths and video-game chimes, and who took Aphex Twin, Perfume and Sade equally seriously.
DX is where all of that stops serving rappers and starts serving itself. Twelve tracks, with a bonus disc of nine more, and almost none of them heard before. "RETAILXTAL" is a direct nod to Aphex Twin's "Xtal", a song Laurence counted among his favourites, its wordless vocal smeared across slow drums. "LUV YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING" drifts into R&B balladry with chords more involved than anything on their rap placements. "HISLO", with Finally Boys, and "ALL MY LIFE+" carry the emotional weight, and "8AM" sounds like the dream just before waking. The palette is consistent, pitched-up vocal fragments, hip-hop drums, keyboards shimmering like a 16-bit sunset, but the writing is what changed. Laurence traced his sense of colour to a trip to Japan at fourteen, and DX has that anime brightness: synthetic, saturated, a little melancholy at the edges. Reznick, for his part, warned that settling into a niche puts an expiration date on your art. DX is a duo refusing one.
The record made several year-end lists, and the same autumn they produced "Solarflare" for Yung Lean's Unknown Death 2002. In 2015 they handled all of Main Attrakionz's 808s & Dark Grapes III and released the While U Wait EP. Then in January 2017 James Laurence died at 27. Reznick put out an unreleased collaboration, "Sweet Dream", a week later, and has since issued Collection II and III from the archive. DX remains the only album Friendzone ever made, a small monument to two people who were asked for beats and handed over a world instead.
