“It’s all very natural for us,” says Kalokoh. “They don’t really show this side of the city.” “That’s when people started asking, ‘Woah, is this coming from Athens?’” says Dazedboi. But things really started to heat up with the video for his track “New Flame”, an ethereal vision of a nocturnal Athens that nobody had seen before. “We want to give a voice to those kids who share similar dreams.”ĪTH Kids’ journey began with Kalokoh’s ATH2090s mixtape, uploaded to Soundcloud in 2015. “It’s based around second-generation immigrant kids born in Athens: all of the experiences we went through, which just aren’t spoken about,” Kalokoh explains. Spear- headed by creative director Rivera, it’s a project that hits close to home for the collective, whose diverse roots can be traced as far and wide as Sierra Leone, Peru and Ecuador.
The group are currently focusing on a short lm inspired by the cult youth movie Kids, which expands upon the themes and messages they have been developing through a series of keenly received solo albums, EPs, singles and music videos. “I just wanna show there are dope artists coming out of Athens.” “This thing has always been bigger than the city we live in,” Kalokoh reflects. If you wanted to do something creative and enterprising in Athens, you had to do it all yourself – but ATH Kids have never let the constraints of their surroundings get in the way of their ambition to speak to the world. With the economy in tatters, capital controls, austerity and huge youth unemployment, opportunities for young people were thin on the ground, prompting tens of thousands to emigrate. The collective, which also comprises DJ Joseph Mouzakitis, rappers Complex Shadow and Majin Cost, and producer Dazedboi, has created a new, cosmopolitan vision of the city, broadcasting its DIY energy to a global audience with bars as strikingly original as their visuals.ĪTH Kids’ ambition is staggering, especially given that the collective was born from the ashes of the Greek nancial crisis – a period which crushed the dreams of a generation of young Athenians, with protests and riots breaking out on an almost daily basis.
But the crew, founded by rapper Kareem Kalokoh and creative director Valentin Rivera in 2015, is fast helping to establish the city as a new frontier for the genre.
“So now we want to lay down the blueprint for those who come after us.” Before ATH Kids, hip hop was the last thing you would associate with Athens. “There was no blueprint for us coming up, we had to be the pioneers,” says ATH Kids beatmaker Taj Jamal. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here
Taken from the autumn 2021 issue of Dazed.