The eclectic collective Dealers of God open up about their origins and inspirations, their process of getting “a bunch of cunts in a room,” and Australia’s mix of “gobsmackingly gorgeous” scenery and historical trauma and isolation.
Dealers of God are mostly from Melbourne, but each of them has a distinct background and a unique set of skills: Lil Meatus was a regular “cobbachino” until a freak accident at the CERN Large Hadron Collider severed him into two separate entities: “One of flesh, one of bone.” Fuelgod, adhering to an “Ancient Brick Proverb,” spits rhymes that “bless this Earth with more myrth [sic] than your Mum’s purse.” Cheesehell (also known as DJ Water) was “born as a ball of sheer petrolium [sic] with a vengeance.” And John City, born and now based in Sweden after a formative Australian adolescence, once “snuck a phone into Florida State Correctional Institute.”
This info comes from Dealers’ website, which also features images of former Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, former United States Vice President Al Gore, Chronicles of Riddick actor Vin Diesel, and several aliens.
One might be forgiven, in light of these unverifiable claims and outlandish depictions of politicians and extraterrestrials, for thinking that the collective (currently a four-piece) is fucking around, and you’d be right to an extent. Their first few projects are full of doodled, drugged-out bars, but underneath the silliness were stunning experiments—songs that pivoted from boom-bap to bluegrass, cloud rap to hardcore, stoner metal to “ambient crunk,” the latter of which they use to describe themselves.
Bushranger (Act 1) is their first record to focus on a single concept. The album and its forthcoming follow-up are based on a lost play called The Death of the Larrikin by an obscure Australian playwright and poet named William R. Clay—so obscure, in fact, that he seems to have disappeared from the internet. The alleged 1945 play tells the tale of a man’s quest to battle his evil twin, who essentially represents all of the evils capitalism has wrought on the world (ALERT: This interview contains spoilers). Clay, apparently a controversial and misunderstood figure in his time, is said to have died two years after writing the play before a booing crowd. His final words: “My life’s hand alone was dealt by some cruel dealer of god’s will.”
Source material notwithstanding, Bushranger is Dealers’ most thematically serious record to date. While it certainly contains healthy doses of freeform fuckery and drug-fueled bars, it also addresses some very real societal ills specific to Australia. Days after the record’s release, I called Meatus and Fuelgod in Melbourne and John City at his current residence in Stockholm (Cheesehell couldn’t make it) to talk conspiracy theories, nitrous oxide, and the art of the freestyle.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Raphael Helfand: I know y’all want to keep your identities private, but can you tell me about where you grew up and how Dealers of God came together?
Fuelgod: All of us have been making music, either by ourselves or together, since high school. John City and I went to the same high school, and Meatus is from the same area, so we all met like 10 years ago, and initially we didn’t make music together. John City and I had a rap project that was mostly us fucking around, but outside of that we’ve all played in bands or produced beats for other artists and ourselves.
This project came together during the pandemic, when Melbourne was the most locked-down city in the world. There were curfews, but they weren’t very well enforced. We were all stuck at home, and I got a message from Cheesehell saying that he was with Meatus and John City, just sipping, and we got together.
Early sessions were mostly freestyled, and I didn’t even realize at the time that anything was gonna come of it, but we ended up with this album Visions of Fuel, and we put it out, and it felt good.
John City: It was all so scattered and loose. We didn’t have a group name for way too long.
Lil Meatus: Genuinely, that project wasn’t meant to happen, but somehow, through the chaos of the universe, it did. That’s why Visions of Fuel is, to a lot of us, our most important album, because it’s purely what Dealers of God is about. And that’s why a lot of people don’t fuck with it, too, because it’s loose and messy and cooked. But there’s a lot of vulnerability. There’s a lot of real shit in that album ’cause it’s totally unfiltered.
What were you listening to back then? Who were Dealers of God’s foundational artists?
Lil Meatus: The music that first brought us together was a lot of Chief Keef and Chris Travis, that Pizza and Codeine album, and Thug. Cheesehell was big into Controlled Bleeding. They started off as a power electronics, early industrial group but then turned into a dub electronic thing, similar to the Orb, which is another big inspiration for us.
John City: Coming into this, I hadn’t been making music for long, and the music I had made was exclusively boom-bap beats, so I wasn’t that hip to much other than your basic trap. I kind of came in blind, but it worked out incredibly.
Fuelgod: I think it’s obvious, especially on the early albums, but we’re all into long-form music. Cheesehell is a big post-rock guy. He’s a big fan of Bark Psychosis and that sort of thing. There are some punk and hardcore and post-hardcore influences too. Unwound are a big influence, especially Leaves Turn Inside You.
The really long-form songs are a big influence on Cheesehell. We’ve all been exposed to it and enjoy it, but he’s obsessed with writing songs that are at least seven minutes, which can be frustrating to be honest with you, but it’s definitely pushed us.
Lil Meatus: It’s sick, though, and I feel like that’s what makes us work as a unit. We’ve all got our different takes on everything. and we combine to make it stronger… Real quick I want to shout out my number one influence on this project: Five Starcle Men. They don’t get enough respect. If anyone is reading this interview right now, listen to Five Starcle Men. They are the OGs of like doing copious amounts of DXM and contacting the mothership and making music. Everything we do follows in their footsteps in some way.
It’s clear when you listen to a Dealers of God album that there’s more than one person’s taste being explored, but it’s crazy how fast the shifts are between styles. How does that work? I’m imagining baseball announcers cutting each other off and switching to their own channel.
Fuelgod: It’s a lot more organic than people might think. The way the music is written is pretty different than other projects I’ve been in. A lot of the time we’ll start a song with a long-form jam that we’ll edit down, or one of us will send the other members a loop or a drum pattern.
Like on “Modern Warfare” on this album, I was making a lot of west coast-influenced stuff after Drakeo the Ruler died, and I just had this [drone metal] idea at the end of it, and I just put them together, and the other members of the band decided it would be worth incorporating into what we were doing. But a lot of the time, we’re trying to make something that’s psychedelic and unpredictable, and that lends itself to making music that’s fairly all over the place.
Bandcamp lists the three of you and Cheesehell as the only ones on this record, but your website lists six of you, plus nine members of the “Dealers Extended Family.” Do you want to clarify who does what?
Lil Meatus: The way that a lot of the Dealers of God sessions go is we’ll get a bunch of cunts in a room, and we don’t know who’s doing what. It’s so freeform. We’re the core members, but a bunch of people will pour in. We want to do the due diligence of crediting everyone because, although it’s us four making the albums, Dealers Gang really is anyone who’s down.
Speaking of your collaborators, tell me about Ben Lee’s feature on this record. That feels like an outlier in your catalog.
Lil Meatus: He’s into the same kind of exploring of other worlds as we are. He’s really keen on exploring different levels of consciousness, so we linked up through some ESP forums for Australia, talking about non-local consciousness, and he was obviously completely anonymous, as were we, and we were both talking about how we were musicians, and then it turns out he’s a massively successful artist who just happened to mess with us after we linked him some of our music.
His music is super influential on Australian culture as a whole, and of course on us. I won’t talk about the experiments too much because it’s kind of boring, but we wanted to see if we could create a songwriting session within the astral plane, essentially using non-local consciousness across cities. And we did, and that’s how a lot of the lyrics were written for the song.
So shoutout Ben Lee. For an artist as big as he is, he genuinely cares so much about supporting Australian music. Australia is historically unfairly repressed. Like, there’s not a whole lot of notable Australian musicians in the zeitgeist. There’s plenty, of course, but they’ve got to leave Australia to make it work. We’re really committed to not doing that and putting our Australian-ness on full display within our music and making that a part of our identity. And the fact that Ben Lee is willing to support that is huge.
Was there anyone else who worked on this album besides you all and him?
Fuelgod: Not really, honestly.
Lil Meatus: It’s interesting. Even on the last album, there were a couple tracks where it was jams with a bunch of people. And on Visions of Fuel, obviously, there are so many people, but this one was pretty much just us. I think there might have been some people in the room for some of the jams. Mixmaster Frogg Cobbler played the keyboard on “It’s Too Easy” with the scat sounds you can hear. I think he goes uncredited, but shout out Mixmaster Frogg Cobbler.
I’m by no means an Australian art aficionado, but my favorite piece of Australian art is the movie Wake in Fright. It’s such a horrifying depiction of the Outback, which is something we don’t really have in the American interior, at least anymore—this massive stretch of desert where there’s just not much of anything for hundreds and hundreds of miles. What do y’all think makes for great, quintessentially Australian art?
Fuelgod: I’m stoked that you mentioned Wake in Fright. That might be my favorite film, and what it’s trying to convey is something that’s pretty essential to what we do. Australia is a country with a similar colonial history to the U.S. but there’s far less known about it or what’s happening here culturally, and there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.
We all grew up listening to music from the U.S. and the U.K. Australians are very used to looking outward for music. We want to flip that and help people feel the darkness you get when you have a bunch of people living in a really hot climate in a country with a dark history. People just go a bit nuts in Australia, for whatever reason. I think it’s a combination of isolation and historical trauma, I guess. If you listen to Nick Cave or someone like that, there’s an exploration of this madness and this substance abuse that’s almost like woven into the culture.
The same can be said of other parts of the world, but in Australia, drug use, alcoholism—the things that inspire how we make music, for better or for worse—are the norm.
We just want people to experience the country the way people experience it when they watch something like Wake in Fright. It’s beautiful and we love it, and there’s something when you’re out in the bush… That landscape has a raw beauty to it. When Europeans came to the country, there wasn’t this beautiful rich green look to it that they associated with beauty, and they were scared of these raw, earthy colors. When you read about the history of Australia, there are constant accounts of Europeans coming here and being driven mad by the fact that the beauty that’s on display here is not what you would associate with beauty if you came from a different part of the world. But we find it beautiful.
Lil Meatus: Gobsmackingly gorgeous. I would never live anywhere else. Sometimes I’ll walk outside and just go, “Fuck. This shit is gorgeous.” You can just go to the park, and it looks like nowhere else on the planet.
Tell me about Billy R. Clay, the inspiration for Bushrangerand, from what I understand, for Dealers of God in general.
Lil Meatus: Good old Billy was really instrumental to what we do and the way we write music and a lot of the themes of our music, and he ended up being instrumental in a lot of Australian culture, too, but by accident.
He’s still super obscure; you can’t even find The Death of Larrikin online anymore. The stuff we have is literally just from his archives. We don’t know how it actually ends, but there’s a copy in the state library down here, I believe.
But everything that he talks about in The Death of the Larrikin is real, the themes of taking down this corrupting, capitalist force that’s exploiting people. In the case of the death of the Larrikin, there’s a direct fraternal tie to it. It’s his brother who’s doing this, and he’s this very low-income, essentially homeless character who decides, “Enough is enough. I need to deal with this.”
We were really inspired by how that paralleled the modern world and what’s been happening everywhere nowadays. He was writing this shit way back in the ’40s, so we decided we wanted The Death of the Larrikin to be the backbone of what we have to say on these two albums.
Not to spoil the ending, but you sort of posted already that he ends up killing his brother and assuming his identity, right?
Lil Meatus: Well, we don’t actually know. That’s the thing. The last couple pages were lost. We don’t even know how many pages, but it stops right when he has the realization, like, “That’s my identical brother. I have the choice to assume his identity.” We don’t know whether he does or doesn’t, which is nuts. The album is almost like fan-fiction. We’re like Peter Jackson recreating the missing bits of King Kong.
Maybe that’s too nutty of a reference, but Peter Jackson was obsessed with King Kong and decided to faithfully remake a bunch of the lost footage that was burnt, so he made the stop-motion thing where the characters fall into the spider pit. We’re like the spider pit of extremely obscure Australian playwrights.
I’ve always loved your production, but I think it’s fair to say your lyrics were a bit rough starting out, especially on Visions of Fuel. I remember Jordan, my old editor at The FADER, writing that you rapped like you had disdain for the genre, which I think was a bit harsh, but I do think it’s pretty clear that you were fucking around.
Lil Meatus: I’ll only speak on this for a little bit, but I truly believe that if you did the same shit we were doing but traded it for like an American style of rapping and flow, we wouldn’t get the same criticisms. There’s a lot of artists out there who’ve been accused of the same thing. Maybe a bad example, but look at Lil B. A lot of people were saying “His flow’s too loose,” and “He doesn’t care about rap, he’s a jerk,” and whatever. But I feel like when you add the Australian accent into the mix, it’s really hard for people to comprehend that we’re taking ourselves seriously.
Australian hip-hop is not represented globally at all, so I think it’s easy to [dismiss] us, especially on the early albums where we’re obviously having fun. But there’s definitely no disdain for the genre.
There’s one track on the first album where you’re poking fun at Sad Boys, which I don’t think anyone would really take issue with, even Swedish cloud rap appreciators like myself. I must ask, though—especially because you’re out in Stockholm, John City—are y’all drainers?
Lil Meatus: Pull up the photo of you with Bladee. Pull up the photo of you with Yung Lean in the pub.
John City: No, no. That shit is sealed in a vault. I’ve gotta give a shout out to our mate Ferris. He put us on to Yung Lean and all that music. He was ahead of everyone. There’s this photo of me and Fuelgod and some others at school in 2015 holding Arizonas, wearing bucket hats. It’s so cursed. But yeah, that shit sent me on a spree on YouTube, finding so much shit. It was definitely very important for me.
In any case, it does seem like you’ve gotten more serious about songcraft over the past few years. Tell me about that transition toward being more thoughtful about lyrics, or at least to writing bars instead of freestyling.
Fuelgod: We wanted this album to have a more cohesive narrative. There’s definitely moments that are still stream of consciousness—on “Bushranger Theme,” you hear John City slightly tipsy on the mic, just saying stuff off the cuff, and we recorded that rant and chopped it up. But it felt important that there was more attention put into the bars here—still keeping it funny at points but ensuring that there was some wordplay that complemented what we were doing.
John City and I made a lot of rap music when we were in high school, and a lot of it came from a similar stream-of-consciousness place. But because we were making an album that was trying to pay respects to the hip-hop we all grew up listening to, it felt like the right step to take. And on future albums, there’s gonna be a bit more bars.
On a similar note, you’ve made conspiracy theories a big part of your whole aesthetic, but you’re now rapping about more serious political issues in Australia.
Lil Meatus: I think we’ve always mixed the two. Even on Visions of Fuel, if you really listen to that album, there’s some dark shit in there and some really revealing shit. There’s extremely funny moments, but there’s a lot of genuine shit we were going through. A lot of the reason we do things this way, even down to the website and stuff—and this is something I want to make quite clear to the Dealers Gang world—is that when we’re talking about serious shit that’s going on that may or may not be what a lot of people call a conspiracy, mixing it with humor is a way of not getting in trouble, because then you can just be like, “We’re just joking, officer!”
Part of the reason that we wanted to start taking our raps a bit seriously in this one is because we wanted to talk about some real shit. But at the same time, the best way to talk about real shit is through a lens of absurdist comedy. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, and I think that’s the best way to break it down for people and to disseminate information. We know how powerful humor is politically.
On this album, we’re talking about a military base that’s responsible for sending drones around the world and killing millions of innocent people, so there’s a fine line, and we’re trying to toe it really carefully. I don’t think people are gonna be super receptive if it’s an album that’s just constantly saying, “This is happening, this is happening, this is happening.” Everything’s a balancing act.
I meant to ask you this before we got into the more serious portion of the interview, but you’ve always had some great drug bars, and my favorite one on this record comes on “Bush Hash” when you’re rapping about “infinite nangs.” Can you tell our American readers what a nang is? And how many nangs is the most nangs you’ve ever done at one time?
Fuelgod: What’s amazing about that song in particular is the fact that none of the vocals are pitch-shifted at all. All of the deep-sounding vocals are literally just me with a balloon filled with nitrous oxide, taking hits before I start rapping. I think that session specifically is the most nitrous oxide I’ve ever had. My B12 levels were probably through the floor. I almost lost control of my spinal cord while I was trying to record that song. I couldn’t even tell you how many it was, to be honest. We had a huge canister that we went through in one go, and I probably had like 20 balloons, or maybe more. I was pretty delirious by the end of it. I definitely do not necessarily condone that sort of behavior, but it got us where we needed to go.
Fuck these guys!!! The fucker is about to obliterate they asses!