by Dan O and Teller Bank$

2025 is a turning point for Teller Bank$ and his fans. As fans. we’ve always gotten fed but this year we got three releases (BLACK MAN! w/ Wino Willy, Drug$$$ w/ Philth Spector, q no rap name,  Killer Kane & Ayashi, and now The Wolf & The Walrus w/ long time collaborator Ed Glorious) of an unprecedented level of unique quality. Not only is each of the three an album of the year candidate but they occupy new terrain in the TB$verse. While the collaborative nature of Drug$$$ is like nothing anyone is doing, BLACK MAN!’s astutely curated vision from Wino Willy makes it stand out as well. Finally, The Wolf and The Walrus is the true beneficiary of at last 5 years collaboration between Ed Glorious  (whose samples drive emcees inward) and Teller.  The Wolf and The Walrus is dense, layered, and immediate so I had to ask Teller the right questions about it.  Here are my five and his responses:

1.Suicide Hotline is an important song series. The first was probably my “no turning back now, I’m a Teller fan now,” moment.  How do you approach adding on to a series that has been so critical for you and your fans? 

A) just with honesty- like nobody intends to feel that way ya know? It’s not a yearly series or something I’m chasing it’s just a feeling I get and then I know. The entire series is comprised of mirrored conversations, based on conversations with my cousin Buttons. He’s been doing life in prison since he was 19 years old so it’s a lot of deep conversations I’ve had with him about life in general but you know— it’s like times I feel weak I find my strength in that like it gets to a point you know somebody well enough to know what they’d say, that’s what these songs are for me. I don’t even remember what albums the first 2 in the series are on to be honest.

2.The work you do with Ed Glorious has a lot to do with duality. The Part and Parcel, The Pride & Glory, The Grotesque & Beautiful in your writing how does duality and contrast help you find the truth? 

A) “The truth” is something I don’t feel like I’m searching for— it just is. I think the truth is for individuals in individual situations, life is too multidimensional to have one truth exist. You can’t apply a universal truth to life cuz only one thing can be true at a time- the duality of life invalidates most truths, you just have to have faith in your choices. There’s people in my past that would tell you I was a horrible person and they’re not wrong- there’s people in that same past that can’t imagine me as anything other than good, because I was good to them. Both those things are “true”, what’s more important is how you feel about what’s happening around you. The “truth about wolves” is gonna depend a lot how you feel about rabbits. 

3.For those of us not familiar with Rent Moneyy beyond the chemistry y’all share, what is it about Rent Moneyy that activates you to such a degree?  Any future Rent Moneyy plans on the way?

A) That’s my real friend, that’s the only person besides my kids that be at my house for real. He’s a great rapper though, that’s why we work well together we do everything very spontaneously, especially these last few years— you’re probably never gonna end up as a feature on my song if you’re not inside my house when I’m making it. That’s just how my best creative work happens since I leaned into it over the years, but I do wanna get back into collaborating with some of the people I came up with in the underground. I’m nothing without the community.

4. The song Trailing is so dense I feel it pulls together years of themes you have been exploring into one succinct conversation about exploitation, moving the lens from drone strikes to Spotify finding the exact right words and peaking with “The violence ain’t senseless. How you deal with fence riders? You burn the fences. Burn the bridges. Burn the village…”  When your writing a song like Trailing how do you scale up from the community to the corporations, map the exploitation while keeping it succinct and understood?

A) Shit I have no idea- I just write my train of thought. To be honest I never go into any song or album I’m workin on with the intention of any narrative or direction. I’m a visual thinker so the scene comes first and I’m just trying to describe the things that I’m seeing- I don’t like to lock myself into anything. At the time I was just thinking about migration- animals migrate constantly for survival— black people migrating via the underground railroad out of slavery- even post slavery into sharecropping, heading north with the idea something better is out there or even just “im going to die here if I don’t leave” – I thought about Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, I thought about the Nakba, I thought about how much money Instagram made indirectly off of the visuals coming out of the Israeli genocide- I thought about how the views are all that matters since the purchase has already been made and subscribed to- whether good or bad, what’s gonna grab more views on the street, the spectacle of a gnarly car accident or a very talented street magician? The name came later, trailing can be all kinda shit— if I’m trailing behind you I could be hunting you- I could be losing, I could be migrating the same path as my ancestors, I don’t know. There’s a lot there.

My music is part of my spirituality and religion- it’s a part of the practice of my faith— it’s a common term between southern baptists and rootworkers called “dying of self”— you’re advised to die of self before you read the Bible or act as a medium. That being said, the reason I’m able to do things like that without it having been something overly thought out is because I read and experience life in an educational way I’m always reading and learning new things, I watch/read the news from multiple sources, I read and study history, I read science magazines, and watch documentaries and all kinda shit all day. I don’t have WiFi at my house I go get physical media and I watch shit over and over, I read things over and over. Rapping is just where my passion and intelligence intersect— I’m taking in all kinda information that’s around me all day whether consciously or subconsciously and because I have the ammo of knowledge, when the spirits align shit like Trailing happens (haha) Travk & Field, Gang $hit etc (foreshadowing).

5. The Wolf makes me want to run through a wall. I was so happy when your performance with McKinley Dixon hit On The Radar Radio because it celebrated the frantic energy you have mastery over. A lot of artists have used frantic energy to push songs further but having full mastery is a different thing and the Busta Rhymes WOO HAH on The Wolf felt so right. How does your frantic energy funnel through the perfectionist tendencies of your editing? How do you balance capturing moments with refinement? 

A) I don’t- I just do what I’m actually feeling, lately I been just rappin freely, I’ll fuck the verse up and just fix it as I’m rapping, so many of my songs come out not all how they’re written on paper. There’s a lot of moments that happened like that on Drug$$$ – really all my work is more about how the song feels. The energy is the most important thing in a hype record, I can’t manufacture that energy in a fake way – when I played sports I used to cuss mfs and pray at the same time like Ray Lewis or Brian Dawkins haha I don’t know what exactly it is but I just have that shit in me. That’s why I can never actually stop making trap music, whether it ever comes out is another story, but that energy has to come out of me whether it’s lifting/training or just raging in my house. There is a daily headbangers ball in the Bank$ residence, I wake up playin trap music on the studio monitors at like 5:30am every morning. That’s the kids alarm clock for school.