The first thing that hits about Dream Beard is not just the collision of sounds.
There is heavy rock in there. Metalcore. Hip hop. Massive hooks. Modern sheen. But underneath all of it there is something that feels far more important than a genre tag. There is memory. There is chaos. There is reinvention. There is a man who has lived enough life to know that songs can carry pain just as easily as they carry power.
That is what makes Dream Beard such an interesting presence right now. On paper, the project could easily be filed away as another genre bending modern heavy act dipping in and out of rap, rock and metal. But once you spend time with the music and even more importantly the story behind it, it becomes clear this is not a surface level aesthetic exercise. Dream Beard is building something out of real experience, real scars, and the kind of self reflection that only comes after a life lived through extremes.
When I caught up with him for crannk, to talk about the new single HIGH LIFE, the conversation began where the best ones often do, right at the root of it all. Before the big collaborations, before Judge and Jury, before the current moment started gathering momentum, there were the early memories that never really leave you. For Dream Beard, one of those was Creed’s Human Clay booming out of a little boombox while he played PlayStation, the kind of simple but all consuming connection to music that hooks you before you even understand why. The other was REM’s Losing My Religion, riding in a black Civic with his dad, windows down, everything in that fleeting moment feeling exactly right.
That combination says a lot. Big hooks. Emotion that lingers. Songs that stay tied to memory long after the moment has passed. You can still hear traces of that in what Dream Beard does now, even when the music is wrapped in distortion, aggression and modern crossover ambition.
His path into music was never conventional. He spoke openly about a troubled upbringing, about being moved around young, about church becoming the place where music really began to take shape. For years he was on stage multiple times a week in that world. He became a pastor. Then life shifted. He walked away from that chapter, started a business, became a father, and music was pushed into the background for a long time.
What brought it back was not some carefully calculated rebrand. It was a moment.
While out with Memphis May Fire, a band he had already been connected to for years, Matty Mullins pulled him on stage on his birthday to perform “Vices” in front of a sold out crowd in Orlando. That, Dream Beard said, was the first time he heard the name Dream Beard called out on stage. More importantly, it was the moment the bug came back. After years away from making music, that was the spark that made him realise he needed to do this again.
From there the pieces started coming together.
A first track took shape with the help of friends. Cameron Mizell came in and helped turn the early ideas into something real. And from that point on, Dream Beard was not just experimenting for the sake of experimenting. He was trying to work out exactly what parts of himself belonged in this project.
That search is written all across the release run so far. Rage came out swinging. It was a statement of arrival, loud, confident and designed to hit. But after that first burst, Dream Beard did something that says a lot about where his head is at as an artist. He stepped away from the easy expectation. He questioned whether being heavy was really him or whether it was just what people expected from the look, the attitude and the energy. That is where songs like Better Man and Madness matter so much in the timeline. They show an artist willing to test his own instincts rather than settle too quickly into a lane that would have been easy to market.
That is also why the more recent material feels so important.
The collaborations with Sada Baby on SPRAY and VOID do not feel like random feature grabs. They feel relational. Organic. Built out of real connection rather than algorithm chasing. Dream Beard spoke about those sessions with genuine excitement, describing SPRAY as a moment where the energy in the room took over and everyone knew they had something. Then came VOID, built with that same chemistry but under completely different circumstances, with Sada Baby refusing to even hear the track beforehand and stepping into the booth cold in the early hours of the morning. That kind of spontaneity is hard to fake, and it speaks to why those songs land the way they do. They are not overthought collisions of worlds. They are artists trusting instinct.
It also reinforces the most important part of Dream Beard’s identity. He does not create with genre as a limitation. He creates with emotion as the compass.
That is what brings everything back to HIGH LIFE.
If SPRAY and VOID helped show the reach of Dream Beard’s sound, HIGH LIFE feels like the moment where all of that experimentation locks into something heavier emotionally. When he spoke about the song, the conversation moved away from surface level writing process and into something much deeper. He talked about coming from a highly controlled and religious world, then later swinging too far the other way, stepping into experiences and traps that pulled him into dark places. Out of that came a song that was less about self destruction than it was about trying to break the cycle before it swallowed him whole.
That is the heart of HIGH LIFE. It is not just a heavy song. It is a plea. A confrontation. A moment of asking whether generational damage and destructive patterns really have to keep carrying forward or whether someone can finally stand up and say enough.
That emotional weight is a huge part of why the Dropout Kings connection matters so much.
Long before the collaboration became real, Dream Beard had already crossed paths with Adam Ramey in a way that sounds almost too perfect to be written. While on ShipRocked with Memphis May Fire, he ended up sharing a cigar and a deep conversation with a stranger in a villa, talking about life, family and God before realising later that the stranger was Adam from Dropout Kings. That chance meeting turned into a real friendship over the years. Through Adam he got to know the band more deeply. Through those relationships he also connected with Black Cat Bill.
So when HIGH LIFE started coming together and the possibility of bringing in Dropout Kings became real, it did not feel manufactured. It felt natural. Almost inevitable.
Dream Beard described the moment Black Cat Bill’s stems came back as the point where the song truly became itself. What had started as an idea suddenly felt complete. Then the music video and the time spent with the band pushed it even further, turning the collaboration into something grounded in actual connection rather than just file sharing and credits on a screen.
That may be the most compelling thing about Dream Beard at this point in his rise. Beneath the chaos, the aesthetic, the characters and the wild sonic swings, there is a real search for meaning in everything he is doing. Not every experiment is about proving range. Some of it is about finding out what parts of himself still need to be heard.
And that is why this current chapter feels like it matters.
With Judge and Jury now in the picture, Cameron Mizell helping sharpen the sound, and songs like SPRAY, VOID and HIGH LIFE mapping out a clearer identity, Dream Beard feels like an artist stepping into focus without losing the unpredictability that made him interesting in the first place. The chaos is still there. The willingness to jump lanes is still there. But now there is more purpose in the way he is putting it all together.
Dream Beard is not chasing neat definitions. He is turning contradiction into catharsis.
And on HIGH LIFE, that catharsis hits harder than ever.
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