Snotty Nose Rez Kids released their sixth studio album RED FUTURE on September 13, 2024, through Sony Music Canada, their major label debut and the closing panel of the trilogy the duo had been building since their debut. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Snotty Nose Rez Kids Red Future record matters now because of what it completed, an independent run that ended with a Juno Award for Rap Album of the Year in 2025.
The road in was long and documented. Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce, Haisla Nation cousins from Kitamaat Village, British Columbia, put out two albums in 2017, broke through with TRAPLINE in 2019, and stacked Polaris Music Prize shortlist places with Life After in 2021 and I’M GOOD, HBU? in 2022. In 2023 they signed with Sony Music Canada, and Metz described the shift in approach while the album was being made:
“We’ve been stepping outside of our comfort zone. We keep trying to push the boundaries and keep elevating our sound and our style.”
Snotty Nose Rez Kids Red Future Looks Forward
The album’s concept is Indigenous futurism: resilience and community imagined as forward-looking forces, the future panel answering TRAPLINE‘s past. The rollout told that story in stages. “I Got Paid Today,” released October 27, 2023 as their major label debut single with vocal cameos from Tia Wood and Lex Leosis, played the signing itself for comedy and relief. “BBE,” short for Big Braid Energy, followed with the official video above in April 2024, a sci-fi styled celebration of braid culture and what it connects: ancestors, the creator and the land, carried with full hip hop swagger.
The full tracklist runs through “WELCOME TO MY WORLD,” “Shapeshifter,” “Free,” “Burn,” “Devil’s Club” with Apsaalooke Nation artist Rezcoast Grizz, “No Dogs Allowed,” “LET YA HAIR DOWN” with Drezus, “Kaleidoscope,” “Peaches” with Princess Nokia, “Future Ancestors” with Jeremy Dutcher, “Burning Man,” “Murder She Wrote” and “One of the Best.” The guest list is a map of the duo’s world: Indigenous artists across nations and generations, from Drezus to Dutcher, plus Aysanabee, Travis Thompson, NorthSideBaby and Tia Wood across the album. It is a community record built at major label scale, which is precisely the point the title makes.
The Receipts: A Juno Win And A National Tour
The album passed five million streams within weeks of release, and the duo took it out on the Red Future Tour, 34 shows across Canada and the United States from September to December 2024, opening with a hometown-scale celebration at Vancouver’s Malkin Bowl on September 21. Canadian hip hop tours of that length, routed through theatres and performing arts centres as well as clubs, are the infrastructure the duo had been building toward since the 100-show TRAPLINE run.
The award season settled the argument. At the 2025 Juno Awards, RED FUTURE won Rap Album/EP of the Year, and coverage of the win noted Snotty Nose Rez Kids as the first Indigenous act to win that category. For a duo whose first Juno nomination came from an independent album in 2019, the win is the catalogue’s clearest before-and-after marker: same writers, same Kitamaat Village grounding, now holding the national rap album prize their earlier shortlist runs had circled.
The Experiment, Played In The Open
Metz also spoke during that cycle about the healing inside the work, describing a duo doing a lot of growing through the album’s creation, and the finished record carries that in its sequencing: the comedy of “I Got Paid Today” sits a few tracks from the weight of “Future Ancestors,” where Jeremy Dutcher’s operatic voice lifts the futurism concept out of metaphor and into ceremony. That range is the experiment Metz named, not a chase for a pop crossover. The production is bigger, the choruses wider, and the writing stays rooted in the same Kitamaat Village specifics that carried the independent records, which is why the major label frame never reads as a costume change.
The visual campaign matched it. The “BBE” video dressed its braid celebration in science fiction styling, and the “WELCOME TO MY WORLD” visualizer opened the album’s world with Tia Wood’s voice carrying the Red Future refrain. Each piece pointed the same direction as the title: forward, on the duo’s own terms, with the community in frame.
How To Hear It Now
Play RED FUTURE after iimiTV’s revisit of TRAPLINE and the seven-year arc resolves exactly as Nyce laid it out: the past record, the present record, and this one, the future, told by the artists themselves. Released September 13, 2024, RED FUTURE is Snotty Nose Rez Kids’ sixth studio album, their Sony Music Canada debut, and the record that carried Haisla hip hop from the Polaris shortlist to a Juno win.
