Tonight Fake Shore Drive hosts a listening party for Alternative Trap, the debut mixtape from local rapper Lucki Ecks, and it’s taken him by surprise. He’s only released a handful of songs, but the response has been strong enough it’s sometimes overwhelmed the 17-year-old MC. “Being a rapper with a buzz, people wanna talk about you, so I just get kinda shy, I don’t wanna talk about it at all,” he says. “Like when people I don’t know come up to me, sometimes I lie about being Lucki.”
He’s ascended pretty quickly. Pitchfork has covered one of the rapper’s few released tracks (“No Troubles”) and Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber has written about industry folks seeking out the young rapper. It’s impressive considering Lucki only started recording less than a year ago, and his career started with a bit of a fluke; back in the fall Lucki recorded a song called “Masterplan,” which a friend uploaded to the Internet without his knowledge. “My friend released it when I went to sleep,” Lucki says. The MC wasn’t too pleased at first (“I was mad as hell,” he says), but the response to “Masterplan” changed things. “I got feedback and was like, ‘Damn, I’m gonna start doing this a lot,'” Lucki says. “I just started going back to the studio a lot.”