Closed
Mouths

I'm Roseblud, a rapper, poet and filmmaker from Broward County, Florida, living in Brooklyn. I grew up as the odd one out, and writing was the first place I ever felt allowed to say how I really felt. That's still the point of everything I make. My music is off-kilter hip hop with neo-soul, funk and spoken word mixed in, made for the lovers, the misfits, and anybody who's been told they don't fit in the box. I want it to feel like a rest stop from the world.

Technically, the first song I ever put out was a diss track about a rival high school, but we don't talk about that. The first one that mattered was for my uncle. He died on Christmas of 2014, when I was 14, and writing to him was the only way I knew how to continue our conversations. Those poems turned into songs, and I decided I was going to make an album for him. I didn't know it yet, but that was the beginning of Closed Mouths. I started performing around South Florida and at FAU, and in 2020 I put out my first album, Mood Ring. It was an experiment and it's rough around the edges, but it showed me how to pull a listener all the way into a world, and it gave me a piece of what I needed to keep going.

In 2022 I moved to New York and found what would become a group of my closest collaborators and eventually, family: Kenji, 3ee, Norah's World, and waytoofresco. Aka Supernova. I started a band (rip Roseblud and the Supernovas), played the rooftop garden at Radio City, and even opened a sold-out show at Baby's All Right for Oscar Jerome. Things didn’t really change until I put out "Spectrum," which opens with "you're probably autistic, but it's cool cause I'm probably autistic too." A lot of people heard themselves in that line, and a lot of them stuck around.

Closed Mouths was supposed to come out in 2025. Instead, I ended up homeless, and I couldn't work on it the way it needed. I was sleeping in the studio most nights, so I just started making music to get through it, writing on couches and city sidewalks, and that became The Search for the Shine. Right in the middle of it, a record deal came along that could've changed everything overnight. The more I looked at it, the more I saw the cost. My peace, my ownership, my freedom. I turned it down, and the album became the story of that choice. By the end of it, I'd figured out the shine I was searching for was never fame or money. It was something as simple as hearing my mother's voice while watching the sunrise.

The Search for the Shine taught me how to let go, and to leave room for people to step into the world I'd made and find their own meaning in it. I started directing and editing my own visuals too, including the visual albums for The Search for the Shine and Leave a Message. Every project since that first song for my uncle has shown me a little more of what Closed Mouths needed to be. This version is about losing another uncle, and about family and all the things I didn't say while I had the chance. Closed mouths don't get fed, so speak before it's too late.