By Katie Li

October 25th 2025

While velvette blue and Garett Caramel’s “Hotline Bling” shares its name—and its romantic indecision—with Drake’s 2016 hit, that’s where the resemblance ends: theirs trades warm, summertime tropical glow for something spacier, rawer, and more internet-native. Somehow, even reimagined as a post-COVID, distant descendant of the Lil B-paved cloud rap genre, it’s deeply nostalgic: an inevitability throughout either of their discographies, whether it’s an All-American Rejects remix; a bratty party anthem by Garett à la Metro Station, Breathe Carolina, or 3OH!3; or an 8-bit video game-esque chiptune beat from velvette. Their ethoses border on antithetical: Garrett’s high-energy, chaotic style rides on an emotive, thrashier vocal delivery, while velvette favors a more laidback, often monotonally whispered vocal melody, his beats frequently defined by a single dreamy synth loop that carries through most of the track. Take Garett’s “Too Hot,” which exists in two incarnations—its original form is more energetically hopeful, before velvette blue’s version strips it into a nihilistic introspection of the comedown the day after. And it’s this phenomena, when the two converge in the studio, that that nostalgic quality is superseded by something entirely new. It’s familiar yet fresh and, for now, genreless until someone finally coins the name that sticks much like the bloghouse genre’s epithetic origins. 

That tension fuels their collaborative project Mixtape, a collection of off-kilter tracks they’ve co-produced over the years somewhere between London and Los Angeles. It’s far from their first link-up—both are New York-based, their creative overlap quietly building from co-hosting downtown swag-era subculture DYAD parties (their party collective alongside Tashi Salsedo, Iliyas Imankulov, Ruben Alejandro, and Atom Vegas) to literally trading remixes. Wedged between the pair in the scene-tested Market Hotel's greenroom, velvette emphatically resigns, “for the record, the All-American Rejects idea was [Garett’s] idea. He did it first and I just copied him. And he was really mad about it.” And Garett’s equally quick to give credit back: “I showed him the [Can’t Take It] remix I did and, then, he did one [dirty little secret (vb version)] that was like 20 times better than mine… I love trying to one-up each other musically.” It’s symptomatic of the sort of healthy competition that pushes you to truly do your best; see one of their names on any weekend’s show flyer (assuredly in the fashion of either mid-00s American Apparel or surrealist Bladee album art) and you can expect the other’s to follow.

True to its eponymy, Mixtape is a six-track loose experiment in their creative co-existence and shared impulse to blur genre lines: described by Garett as “not planned to be a whole project until the last minute,” and by velvette as “a collection of miscellaneous things we’d made over the years [... that] we spent time turning into a more polished project that was more cohesive.” Though the tone may waver from track to track, often oscillating between introspective melancholy like in “Track 6” or wow-the-streets-are-my-catwalk like in “HD,” the mixtape’s cohesion centers mostly on 3 key elements—instrumentation, lyrical repetition, and 2000s club-style adlibs.

1. Instrumentation - Threading through the mixtape is a recurring synth sound—beepy, bright, and slightly eerie, recalling the sterile cursedness of Pokemon’s Lavender Town theme—shifting only in pattern, modal key, and amount of reverb from track to track. Complimenting it are trap-style drums, surprisingly prominent here against the duo’s usual electronic percussion tendencies, which add a dark, witchhouse-y punch reminiscent of Salem. 

2. Lyrical repetition - Though Garett Caramel’s individual discography typically favors ever-changing lyrics, akin to storytelling in structural form, Mixtape sees incessant repetition of broadly-themed lyrics even in its more vocally-oriented tracks. Still, the repeated lines refuse to get stale: modified sparingly by slight changes in wording or alternating voices between choruses and echoes. “I try to tell you it’s over” becomes “I told you it’s over,” “please don’t even call my phone” becomes “call my phone, call my phone, call my phone”—morphing more into urgent pleas than vivid stories.

3. Adlibs - In opposition to the project’s emotionally-loaded musing, its adlibs are playful: callbacks to early 2000s rap and DJ tags engineered specifically for hyping up arena audiences. Immediately, Miami “Anthem King” DJ Khaled’s adlibs come to mind—the voices are similar and Mixtape’s “best music” and “the hottest in the streets right now” sounds awfully similar to Khaled’s infamous “we da best music”... At first listen, their adlibs feel ironic, disorientingly interjecting soft synth sounds and a mostly minor key palette (after all, Khaled’s adlibs are normally met with “bro, just start the song already” or “he made 38 seconds sound like 11 minutes”). But after adapting to how the tags are ready to trigger at any given moment, serious or not, perhaps it's more of self-referential brilliance… It’s no surprise the adlibs are most prevalent in “Hotline Bling (Miami Everything),” which Garett tells us between laughs is “you know, everything about Miami in one song.” Appropriately accompanying “100% music” or “you’re listening to real music” is an OG airhorn sample the pair downloaded in, you guessed it, Miami. And, it brings me straight to the part in my brain reserved for Pitbull and LMFAO. Both Garett and velvette assuredly abdicate much hometown musical influence on their music, from West Palm Beach, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively; but, maybe, it’s just Miami that’s inescapable.

You can catch the duo now on their 100% Tour, traversing Europe from Budapest to Berlin. They’re performing live—a rarity for fans more accustomed to their 2 AM DJ sets—alongside Rubi Rockerfish, another DYAD collaborator and one-half of velvette blue’s other duo project dgnr8: more rock-oriented and indicative of his childhood love of Linkin Park. Garrett promises that “music is the only thing that matters to me,” teasing his debut album as the culmination of years of experimentation, from initially producing drum and bass to bumping Skrillex and YouTube complextro-style intros as a kid. Declaring “its everything [he's] proud of from the last four years," velvette has officially announced his upcoming album, Feels Like Heaven, slated to hit streaming services this week; its lead single, “Moonlight,” dropped just two Thursdays ago and has already carved out a permanent spot in my rotation. What comes next for their work as a duo remains to be seen, whether that’s behind-the-scenes subtly outdoing the other or an official release —but if Mixtape is any indication, it’s something we should all be excited for.

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Watch our full conversation with velvette blue and Garett Caramel below.