Zmack Delivers a Memorial to a Late Best Friend Into "Rustbelt Rejects" Album

Zmack made "Rustbelt Rejects" as a way to honor CJ, his best friend since seventh grade, who died a few years ago after spending years alongside him rapping, freestyling, and building beats together. The Akron artist gives that loss real weight throughout the album, treating the record less as a straightforward rap project and more as a document of everything he's learned since that friendship shaped his entire approach to music.

Zmack handled the beats and vocals entirely himself, with Dave contributing production help and mixing and mastering support. Longtime friends Charles and Jordan bounced ideas throughout the process, girlfriend Rianna pushed him to actually release the material, and Rob helped with promotion and feedback. That circle mattered directly to how the album came together, recorded between Zmack's home setup and Dave's space in Northeast Ohio without any outside studio involved.

The writing refuses to settle into one fixed theme. Zmack has described the album as a series of snapshots rather than a single story, pulling in Rust Belt identity, Irish-American heritage, grief, and personal history without forcing any one thread to dominate. That range shows clearly across the three tracks he points to as most representative: "Rust Sound" captures the environment and attitude of growing up in an overlooked region, "Blood of the Irish" turns inward toward heritage and pride, and "Dirty Muskrat" leans into darker, stranger territory entirely.

Recorded using distorted slap-bass, industrial power-tool textures, and dubstep-influenced low end layered against Memphis-inspired drums, the production pulls from Horrorcore, doom, nu-metal, and funk-metal without trying to resolve those influences into something tidy. Zmack has said plainly that he wanted the roughness to stay audible rather than getting smoothed out in the mix.

"Rustbelt Rejects" asks listeners to accept an album that refuses genre boundaries on purpose, and Zmack earns that refusal honestly, building the whole project from real loss, real geography, and years of quiet development that finally found somewhere to land.