Snotty Nose Rez Kids released their third album TRAPLINE on May 10, 2019, independently, the record that turned a fast-rising Haisla hip hop duo from Kitamaat Village, British Columbia into a national story. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Snotty Nose Rez Kids Trapline record still stands as the hinge of their career, the point where two years of relentless independent work converted into a Polaris Music Prize shortlist place, a first Juno nomination and a 100-show tour.
The duo is two cousins: Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce, Haisla Nation rappers who formed Snotty Nose Rez Kids in 2016 and moved at a pace most acts never attempt. Their self-titled debut album arrived in January 2017, and a follow-up, The Average Savage, landed the same year and was shortlisted for the 2018 Polaris Music Prize. By the time TRAPLINE came, the pattern was set: humour, anger, cultural pride and Indigenous political perspective, delivered as high-energy rap first and never as a lecture with beats attached.
Snotty Nose Rez Kids Trapline Names The Past
Nyce has since explained where TRAPLINE sits in the duo’s own map of their catalogue:
“Some of our projects have been a trilogy, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, Trapline, and Red Future. Trapline was past, Snotty Nose Rez Kids was present, and this one is future. It tells the story of who we are, where we’re from, and where we’re going.”
A trapline is a working line through the bush, a route of traps checked and reset across a territory, and as a title for the “past” record it does double duty: it names the Haisla land the duo comes from and the labour underneath the music. The album keeps that grounding audible throughout, moving between celebration and structural critique without softening either. Where the debut announced them and The Average Savage proved range, TRAPLINE is the record where the worldview is fully assembled: Indigenous identity as present-tense fact and forward motion, not as background.
Boujee Natives, The Breakout
The album’s breakout single is “Boujee Natives,” the official audio above, written by Nyce and Metz with composer Taylor King. The title alone is the duo’s method in two words: a slang word for luxury aspiration set directly against the word the country uses for its first peoples, played for wit and pride at once. The song became the calling card that travelled ahead of the album, the track program directors and prize juries reached for first, and it remains the most streamed entry point into the whole catalogue.
Around it, the album plays like a statement of intent sequenced for the stage, which is where the duo converted listeners fastest. The TRAPLINE cycle took them out on a 100-show run across multiple countries, a touring load that independent Canadian hip hop acts rarely sustain, and the live reputation built on that run is a large part of why every later album arrived with an audience already waiting. Exclaim! placed the album among the best Canadian hip hop records of its year, and the award season followed the touring: a place on the 2019 Polaris Music Prize shortlist, beside some of the most acclaimed independent records in the country that year, and the duo’s first Juno Award nomination.
What Trapline Set In Motion
Read from 2026, TRAPLINE is the first panel of the sequence Nyce described. Life After followed on October 22, 2021, written through the pandemic and shortlisted again; I’M GOOD, HBU? arrived in 2022 and took another Polaris shortlist place and a Prism Prize for the “Damn Right” video; and the trilogy’s future panel, RED FUTURE, closed the arc in 2024 on a major label. None of that later scale changes what this record is: an independent album, made on the duo’s own terms, that carried a Haisla perspective into the centre of Canadian hip hop and stayed there.
The shortlist run is the cleanest measure. Snotty Nose Rez Kids reached the Polaris shortlist with The Average Savage, then again with TRAPLINE, then kept returning with the albums that followed, a consistency no gimmick sustains. It comes from the writing: specific places, specific history, jokes that land because the verses underneath them are serious. Canadian hip hop has a long tradition of regional scenes talking to themselves; TRAPLINE is one of the records that made a national audience listen to Kitamaat Village on its own terms.
How To Hear It Now
Play TRAPLINE between The Average Savage and iimiTV’s revisit of RED FUTURE and the trilogy logic Nyce described becomes audible: past, present and future, sequenced across seven years of catalogue. Released May 10, 2019, TRAPLINE is Snotty Nose Rez Kids’ third album and their breakthrough, the record where the trapline they had been running since 2016 reached the whole country.
