MCR-T knows what it is to be an insider and an outsider

The Live From Earth affiliate’s uncompromising, genre-mulching approach nods to Berlin’s countercultural legacy to create a sound that rejects tired clichés for something bracingly new.

Striding across the lobby of Soho House Berlin, Julian McCarthy, a.k.a. multihyphenate producer-songwriter-DJ MCR-T, strikes an imposing figure. Standing approximately 6ft 5in in black platform boots, he’s wrapped in a fuzzy brown fleece jacket. When he spots me, he apologises profusely for being late. Although it’s the afternoon of 8 January, he is still dealing with the aftermath of his various New Year’s Eve activities. A few nights earlier, he had closed out Berghain for Live From Earth Klub – a semi-regular party hosted by the multidisciplinary artist collective of the same name that brought him into the spotlight in the mid 2010s. One thing led to another, and, well… 

As we make our way upstairs to the hotel’s restaurant, I study McCarthy in the elevator: square shoulders, neatly trimmed pencil moustache, a couple of tattoos dotting his shaved head. You could pick him out of a line-up as a big player in Berlin’s electronic music scene – which is not to say his look is predictable, just well curated. However, within the first few minutes of meeting McCarthy, the impression is of someone who goes out of their way to eschew clichés – not just in his affable demeanour, but in everything they present, including their music. 

His first album under the MCR-T moniker, Not the Same≠, plays like a wildly eclectic rundown of the last 30 years of German underground music, filtered through the experience of coming up mixed-race in one of Europe’s most multicultural capitals. The album skips from hip-hop to techno, to industrial, to synth-pop, purposefully smashing expectations from track to track, all while maintaining a cohesiveness that ensures it never slides into chaos. 

McCarthy is a Berliner, born and bred. His mother is German and his dad is Jamaican-American, thus he speaks English with the cadence and vocabulary of an American, but with the soft vowels of a German accent. While many people in Berlin’s music scene crash-land here from other big cities, he has been steadily grinding since his school days, chipping away at the city’s gruffness. “I probably started taking music seriously as a career sometime in university,” he says, as we sit down at our table. “I went to school for film and media design, but at the same time, music was always a thing. My parents gave me a keyboard when I was young, because I was just annoying the fuck out of everybody at home. So they were like, ‘OK, we’re gonna send you to music school.’”

Consequently, McCarthy attended music school for 13 years, receiving classical piano training before branching out into jazz and, later, developing a borderline unhealthy obsession with Alicia Keys (“I learned her entire fucking songbook,” he says excitedly. “Once, I fucking saw her and Swizz Beatz at an event here in Berlin, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, sign my shit, you have no idea how much time I spent playing your songs!’”). But his passion for music remained on the back burner until 2015, when, bored in class, he realised that what was missing from his film and media studies was his own musical stylings. 

“It was like, yo, I can pretty much do all the visual stuff, the filming and the editing. I was tired of using other people’s music,” he explains. “I’ve always been good at creative writing, and I’ve always felt very confident in my knowledge of how music is supposed to sound. I’m like a vessel, it just comes to me. So, it’s 2015, and I’m just wasting time in class, on Ableton, doing my thing – I was always high as fuck in class too, sitting in the back like, ‘I got these beats, man, I got these beats!’” he laughs. Simultaneously, Live From Earth had begun shaping their own niche in Berlin’s music scene, signing popular artists like Yung Hurn, DJ Heroin and Caramelo. Now, with his new self-penned tracks under his belt, McCarthy’s hustler instincts kicked in. “I got on Live From Earth because I was literally just spamming everybody, all the time,” he says, grinning. “I knew some folks who were tight with the OG crew, so eventually, they got a hold of my first mixtapes and decided to sign me – but as a rapper first.”

In late 2017, he released Style Wars, his debut album as MCNZI (pronounced “McNazi”) – a brash and bombastic hip-hop alter ego with a punk ethos. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he immediately courted controversy. “The MCNZI era was my artistry at an infant stage,” he says. “At the time, I was a bit dazed and confused. I was going hard and not giving a fuck because I had nothing to lose. I felt caught between worlds. I was way too Americanised for my German homies, but for my American homies, I was the super-Euro poster boy. Sometimes in Germany, I’ll pass as anything but a Black-identifying person, and in America, vice-versa. The character of MCNZI was about exploring that lack of identity: Who am I? Where do I come from?”

Spoiler alert: the German music industry couldn’t handle the name – or rather, a person of colour pointing a finger at their country’s own sordid history. After a few years of releases on Live From Earth, McCarthy found himself at a crossroads. “As somebody who has actually stood up for oppressed people, went to demonstrations and threw hands with fucking skinheads, I feel like I earned my stripes to own that name, you know? I never once heard from another person of colour that the name was too much – it was always the same entitled white people who, at the same time, never did anything for me when I needed help.”

The pushback from media and promoters, coupled with Germany’s strangely insular and melanin-deprived Deutschrap scene, led McCarthy to pivot from hip-hop and rap to focusing more on his electronic output. “Live From Earth kind of forced me to come up with a new name, and of course, stubborn-ass me was like, ‘Fuck that! Let’s piss against the rain until we die!’ But in the end, I decided to bring more of myself into it – I just abbreviated ‘McCarthy’ like the Jamaicans would say it, no ‘th’. Now, there’s no longer a character. There’s no differentiation between the real-life me and MCR-T.”

It feels almost cheesy to say, but often, just being yourself is the quickest route to success. Not the Same≠ couldn’t have been made by anyone other than MCR-T, as someone who is both deeply entrenched in Berlin’s music culture and, at the same time, able to bring an outsider perspective. One of the album’s highlights is How To: Getting Up 101, a track that blends ghettotech with old-school hip-hop, and ends up sounding like Grandmaster Flash at a basement rave. Not only is it groovy and fun, but McCarthy raps masterfully, embodying a deliberately retro flow without slipping into pastiche.

“For that track, the idea was, ‘OK, what is hip-hop?’ It’s giving back to the community. It’s putting tools in other people’s hands and telling them, ‘This is how we do it.’ I wanted to put in a rap like the Sugarhill Gang or something, and let it have that old-school energy of walking you through a lesson step-by-step.” Swinging 180 degrees in the other direction, 1 Berliner is a hometown homage where McCarthy almost reverts to his old MCNZI persona, rapping in rapid-fire German about his rise. While trap beats have been de rigueur in Deutschrap for years, on 1 Berliner, McCarthy spits over a gritty electro beat, instantly elevating the track above standard German hip-hop fare. In the song’s video, McCarthy and his crew visit iconic Berlin landmarks through a fisheye lens – kicking a ball about in front of Olympiastadion, sipping champagne at the top of the KaDeWe department store – and you see why McCarthy is such a unique force in the city. He’s not trying to make Berlin something it’s not; he’s not comparing it to New York or London. He embraces all the quirks and contradictions that make it the grimy, messy, exhilarating melting pot he calls home.

As we finish up our meal, the sun is starting to set. I glance at my phone: 3:35pm. The seasonal affective disorder has well and truly set in, and as we prepare to face the cold outdoors, I bring up what might be the best track on Not the Same≠, Die Angst In Mir (“The Fear in Me”). It’s a straight-up industrial EBM headfuck in the vein of Nitzer Ebb or Jäger 90, and it clearly expresses something buried and dark. In a distorted Teutonic growl, he sings: “It’s the fear in me that extinguishes and breaks my light/ That makes me dance in madness/ That you feed and abandon.” During our conversation, McCarthy has hinted at 2024 having been a particularly difficult year for him, but hesitates to elaborate, alluding to the fact that Die Angst In Mir says all that needs to be said.

“First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person of colour do EBM music in German. But secondly…” he pauses briefly. “OK, at the time, I was on some seriously troubling, dark shit, and I was like, ‘Let’s see if we make it through this. If we don’t, then at least we have this song.’” And although the harsh EBM beat lends itself perfectly to the song’s heavy mood, even that choice wasn’t just a musical one. It calls back to McCarthy’s relationship with his hometown.

“I’m always exploring my Berlin heritage and how to incorporate the sounds that are part of the city. I want to own the things that come naturally to us: the dark, haunting stuff, the language, but also the never-ending desire to break free.” He speaks excitedly about his love of the cult documentary B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989, and I get the sense that he’s striving to carry on the legacy of the countless seminal Berlin musicians who came before him. “I mean, up until the 90s, all the art that was crafted here had this underlying tone of ‘everything sucks, we want to tear this wall down and come together again’. That’s why the album is called Not the Same≠: it’s saying, ‘Fuck what you’re doing, we’re doing it like this because we’re us.’”