Sometimes you have to blow things up and start over again to some degree, even if things were working in the first place. A fresh start, a blank canvas, can inspire the creative process like the first time.
But does it count as starting over if you’re doing it with your day-ones?
Besphrenz, the genre-defying hip-hop/R&B/indie rock band mostly based in Philadelphia, is true to its name. Made up of childhood friends C.J. Smith, Taylor Richardson, and Rob Deckhart, Besphrenz found itself suddenly a part of the music industry machine when the original plan was just to make some stuff for themselves and their friends back in 2018.
“We threw a song out just for our friends under this silly name thinking no one would ever hear it, and Spotify put it on all these playlists, and next thing we know we’re off to the races,” Smith says. He’s nestled in a corner booth of the Blind Barber in Philadelphia, a bar-slash-barber shop that he is a part owner of, alongside the likes of Phillies star Bryce Harper. “I think up until that point, if we had 500 plays it was an amazing thing,” Smith says.
Thanks to appearing on a Spotify playlist called “Bedroom Pop” with poppy lo-ish fi songs like “Tired Eyes” and the “Fresh Finds: Class of 2019” playlist with “dreamgurl,” more eyes were suddenly on the trio.
By 2020, things slowed down for Besphrenz like it had for everyone. Smith and Richardson relocated to Nashville while Deckhart stayed on East Coast time, and the guys “put a pause” on things to regroup and recalibrate.
“We were in L.A. and Nashville all the time, and all of a sudden there was all of this pressure to have to put something out every six or eight weeks,” Smith says. “And that’s OK, too, but I think we realized for ourselves what we were really trying to do. So we kind of just hit pause and went back to the drawing board.”
Fast-forward to 2025, and the trio is readying its first official full length release, Bert. The idea of it being a full-length came from happenstance, too. The three of them had just gotten together as friends to make some music and ended up with what Smith describes in industry speak as “a shit ton of songs.”
“It seemed like the pressure was gone,” he says. “We had signed with a big manager in L.A., and that contract, we kind of just let it dissolve. We cut ties with all of those things, and we were like, ‘Now we can just do whatever we want.’”
“Whatever we want” for Besphrenz means taking melodies that sound like Soundcloud rap bars, letting those breathe for a few minutes before kicking in with more analog instrumentation and flipping things on their head with noodly guitars reminiscent of the likes of Rx Bandits.
Perhaps the most impressive part of all of it is that they’ve made sense of the moving parts and different sonic pieces and not only turned it into an album, but constructed it in a way that it sounds cohesive from top-to-bottom as a singular entity.
“Every transition is planned,” Smith says. “From a theory perspective, everything is melded in so the listener could just throw it on and it could be one long song essentially—with a lot of transition—or they could skip through. For us, just as creatives, that was super exciting and a lot of fun. Because up until that point it had been about creating just one song and throwing it out there. I think we’re just stoked to have a body of work and make a tangible thing. We got our test pressings back the other day. To hold it and just have it for yourself…sweet, we did it.”
This “from many, one” approach of the songs, with a host of influences and ideas and creative pathways ending in one singular piece is representative of the band. Smith, who has been in both music and hospitality circles for his adult life, has plenty of plates spinning. He’s a multi-hyphenate. And for the band, like plenty of others that started in high school, there was no definitive “We are a [genre] band.” You just made sounds based on what you liked, and hopefully it turns out good. They’re just three guys who love each other, and the output is the output that comes from that.
By now, having spent enough time in the Philly scene, the guys in Besphrenz have made more friends to add even more magic and confusion to their operation, like Good Old War’s Keith Goodwin and Anthony Green from Saosin, Circa Survive, and L.S. Dunes, in addition to his own prolific solo output.
Green’s trademark high-pitched vocals are featured on “yeah,” the lead single from Bert, which also includes Goodwin’s help with instrumentation and production.
Smith knew Goodwin as a high school kid in the Philly suburbs, when he was a fan of the Good Old War guys’ pop punk band Days Away. Eventually, Goodwin became aware of what the Besphrenz guys were up to, and enlisted Deckhart for his own projects. That turned into a close friendship between the band and Goodwin, who in turn introduced them to Green and he found his way into the fold, expanding the group of best friends in Besphrenz from three to five.
“It feels cool because we idolized them growing up, and now Keith and Anthony feel like Rob and Taylor—a couple of other dudes who grew up in our hometown,” Smith says. “I don’t think we lost hope, but we took a step back, and Keith has been such a cheerleader. Anthony, too. And it’s cool when people help when you’re not asking for it. They’re always there and asking, ‘Hey, what do we need to do?’ At the end of the day it’s cool to work with people you grew up with, whether they’re household names to everyone else. I think that collaboration is more meaningful to me than others.”
Besphrenz spent time in the machine, and while it didn’t break the friendship or the creative force behind the group, the three childhood friends at least saw what was really important in all of this: Each other. It sounds corny to distill the group down to a name that sort of started as a joke, playing on the trend of the time for Soundcloud artists to spell things phonetically and in silly ways. But Smith continues to hammer the point home: The goal is just to keep making music together as the three of them. If that leads to an even more comfortable “career,” that’d be just great. But they’re very much in agreement that it’s not the prime directive.
If it were, they probably wouldn’t try so many different things in the writing process. But, that could turn out to be a blessing in an era where the robots are starting to try their hand at art.
“We’re making AI-proof music,” Smith says. “Maybe that’s the move.”
