Get the first listen to Tuka and Alex The Astronaut’s new collab, Dickheads

Tuka is a musician who, at this point, needs no introduction in the world of Australian hip-hop. For the last 15 years, Tuka has existed as a crucial part to New South Wales’ rap scene in various forms, from helping put his Blue Mountains hometown on the map through his earlier groups, to the formation of now-iconic Thundamentals; the four-piece that have been quintessential to the country’s hip-hop status since their formation. Then, there’s - of course - the solo Tuka project too, a place for the musician to experiment and showcase his charm away from the other projects and the sounds surrounding them.

In 2019 especially, Tuka seemed unstoppable. After a few years away from the limelight, he returned with a trio of singles that brought forward that aforementioned charm and his consistent sense of brilliance. From F*ck You Pay Me’s hard-hitting, confrontational brashness to Selling Me Out’s subtle, almost-tropical-esque relaxed sound and Trailer Trash’s quick-firing fierceness, they were tracks that highlighted his versatility and his capability to adapt and triumph to whatever he’d set out to; no sound holding Tuka to his limits as he shifts and warps between different styles and energies across tracks.

His new one and his first for 2020, Dickhead, proves that he’s not slowing down in the new decade. Enlisting Alex The Astronaut for a tongue-in-cheek, pop-centric chorus, Dickhead is a single that continues to break new ground for Tuka, uniting this light-hearted sense of playfulness with a seriousness emphasised in its chorus: “I guess some people are dickheads, that’s fine they cannot help it, unless you tell them that’s why they’re dickheads,” Alex sings in its chorus. “I ain’t got time for that.” Some people are dickheads, it’s something Tuka and Alex The Astronaut have both faced and talked about in the past, but if you call those dickheads out, often they’ll fall back in line (otherwise, they’re someone you shouldn’t have time for).

“Dickheads is a tongue in cheek song basically. I feel like the hook kind of spells out the meaning,” says Tuka on the track, before dissecting its creation. “I wrote it with longtime collaborator DJ Morgs and Carl Dimataga of Thundamentals. We've made tons of music together but never for my solo project so I really enjoyed that. Mixing the old with the new, recording live instruments but making them sound like samples from the boom-bap era but still programming trap drums so the pace of the track still feels current, we went all gospel at the end just to get weird with it, it really was a fun song to make.”

There’s plenty to enjoy here and with a message we can’t help but reinforce, we’re going to tell you to dive straight into the track and check out its lyric video below:

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