Photos and cover by @FotoGenocide_
If you’re late to the party, we’d like to introduce you to Loren. Formerly known as Logan and Logan Cage the Chicago music vet is all set to make his reentrance unto your radar. The 23-year-old—born Loren Vargas Jr.—first came on the scene as Logan with a string of hard-hitting singles produced by longtime collaborator Flight with accompanying videos directed by Chicago videographer J. Krown. Garnering hundreds of thousands a plays in the blink of an eye, he was quickly established as an artist to watch, seemingly on the bill for half of all Chicago indie shows. Now, taking a step back and some time off amidst a rebrand, Loren is finally ready to unveil his first project under the new name, Fake Deep.
We sat down with Loren the day after his headliner at Reggie’s, his first in over a year, to talk about Fake Deep, his process, and what’s on the horizon. This is only Loren’s beginning. What comes next, he promises, will be the real show.
What is Fake Deep?
It’s damn near just like a process, honestly, of me and Flight having fun in the studio for six months. We made like 40 songs, but we narrowed it down to 10. I also feel it’s a play on what the whole rap game is on right now. Everybody is fake deep, fake woke, fake lit. Trying to sell you something. Nobody is really authentic right now. It’s all bullshit. I wanted to take it back to rapping like on 1636, but a few turnup joints to go with my new style. I didn’t wanna go too deep and talking about political stuff I don’t know enough about. I try to focus on my personal life.
What separates this from your other projects?
I don’t really know what’s “technically” different, but I know that this feels different. I know you can hear me getting better as an artist, period. Not necessarily in songwriting, but in cadences, flows. I think you just see the progression and the hunger again. This is a welcome back.
You’re pretty well known for having a fairly devoted “grassroots” fanbase. How has that affected how you approach your career as of late?
I feel like a lot of my fans that fucked with me when I was Logan haven’t caught on that I’ve changed my name yet. Like, I keep running into people that think I just quit. So I think that I have a core group of fans that I’m building with Loren, but I also got a core that might be interested in looking for Logan, but they don’t know where to find it. I think it’s all gonna collide. People that used to fuck with me that don’t fuck with me now either because they can’t find the new music or they don’t like the new music, I think it’s just gonna come full circle and build rapidly.