A rapper from Gniezno, born in 1995. His first serious attempts at rap music date back to 2011. He has also made a name for himself as a producer, DJ and radio personality. Miły’s work is characterised by openness to a variety of styles and frequent releases.
Miłosz Szymkowiak has been close to hip-hop culture from an early age. He was born and raised in Gniezno, which is considered one of the Polish capitals of breakdance. He himself also attended dance training sessions and sometimes painted graffiti. He was introduced to rap music by his sister, as he recalled in a 2020 interview:
Text
I have an older sister who used to play this stuff for me. Somewhere between the ages of six and nine I listened to Peja and Slums Attack, K.A.S.T.A. Skład, Kaliber 44 and Paktofonika, WWO, Zip Skład. Among foreign performers, I first got to know Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and 2Pac. I discovered the East Coast artists a little bit later.
Long momentum
By the time his first official album was released, Miły had been operating in the rap underground for more than a decade. He started by freestyling at middle school parties, then took up beat production, before finally starting to write lyrics and becoming an MC. Interestingly, although Miły ATZ admits that he has continued to construct beats throughout his music-making adventure, to date he has only recorded tracks based on other producers’ compositions. His first mixtape was self-released in 2011, and the following years brought seven more such releases, usually based on ‘stolen’ beats previously used by other artists.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Miły ATZ, photo: Def Jam Recordings Poland
Picture image
mily atz2 okladka.jpg
The breakthrough period for Miły ATZ was 2014 to 2018, when he co-founded the Mordor Muzik collective. At that time, he got to know grime music, which became a reference point for his own artistic path:
Text
Ginger from Mordor Muzik showed me everything related to the different sound system scenes: reggae, dub and dubstep. Spending time with him, I started to absorb these sounds, I liked them a lot. Starting with dubstep, we went in a more grime direction. [...] When I heard grime for the first time and how they rap, I just fell in love with it. I found that I wanted to do something like that. Man, I remember hearing the track ‘Shaky’ by DJ Maximum – all of BBK, Skepta’s crew was there. It was one of the first tracks that caught my ear, their rap really got me.
Miły ATZ chose an aesthetic that was not very popular in Poland, and although there were few artists who took up grime-style rapping, one of them – Wuzet – became an important inspiration for Milosz. Part of the reason for the rarity of the genre is surely the difficulty of writing lyrics that fit into its rhythmic divisions or syllable arrangements. Miłosz estimated that it takes four times longer to write a grime song, in which meaning and message also play an important role, than it does for ‘normal rap’.
For Szymkowiak, the years of co-founding Mordor Muzik were not only a time of learning more genres, shaping his own style and gaining increasing recognition, but also a time of moving to Poznań. Together with the collective’s co-founders Ginger and Majki, he lived in the same house. At the time, they were not interested in practically anything related to the Polish hip-hop scene. As the artist recalled in 2020, ‘we didn’t give a shit about everything and everyone, we didn’t talk to the community and just played our parties, being a separate phenomenon. That definitely didn’t help us, which I realised after time.’
Under the Mordor Muzik label between 2015 and 2018, Miły ATZ did not release as many recordings as he would have liked. The artist emphasised that it was only the start of his mature solo chapter that allowed him to fully spread his wings, but it was nevertheless the singles Zgrane Trio, Strefa Komfortu and the biggest hit Dawaj na Parkiet released on the aforementioned collective’s channel that ensured his nationwide popularity.
From ‘Dyktafon’ to ‘Black Swing’
Shortly afterwards, Miły ATZ moved out of Poznań to the coast, where for a while he combined his day job (he was, among other things, a cook in a restaurant serving Japanese cuisine, and he also distributed household appliances in Pomerania, working for a large chain of shops) with recording music. It was then that he befriended the artists of the UNDADASEA collective and Gedz.
A milestone turned out to be the mixtape Dyktafon, released in spring 2019 in collaboration with Wiadrowski. The self-released material received a lot of praise and contributed to Miły ATZ being included in the line-up of the seventh edition of the Popkiller portal’s ‘Młode Wilki’ roundup that autumn, presenting the most interesting young figures of the Polish hip-hop scene. The Popkiller jury praised the rapper’s grime-inspired style, adding that on Dyktafon he also excelled over beats with a classic, laid-back sound:
Text
Grime-like rap, sharp punchlines, interesting wordplay and refined technique are the qualities with which Miły ATZ stands out on the Polish rap scene. With his verses in such numbers as ‘Strefa Komfortu’, ‘Dawaj na Parkiet’ or ‘Nie Wiem Jak Ty’, he captured the attention of listeners, providing a huge amount of fresh dancefloor energy
Back in December 2019, Poland’s leading hip-hop label Def Jam announced signing a contract with Miły ATZ and announced the release of his debut album Czarny Swing (Black Swing) the following spring. The album contained 15 compositions that combined Szymkowiak’s diverse inspirations, but also aspirations – and left neither fans nor the media indifferent. The album debuted in the fourth place of the Official Sales List (OLiS). Bartek Woynicz wrote in the pages of Nowa Muzyka:
Text
Fifteen tracks spanning a wide range of genre styles, but at the same time creating material that is very coherent, upbeat and, above all, filled with deep bass. Certainly, it is much easier to name a few favourites in this collection than to point out moments of a decline in quality, because the album simply plays very well from start to finish.
In the stream of positive words, however, there were also critical remarks, as outlined by an Interia reviewer:
Text
On ‘Czarny Swing’, the young rapper is left alone with a formulaic metre, with a whole lot of rhyming sticking to an uncomplicated, not to say obvious, rhyme scheme in the type of the one from the title track – bling / swing / ring / link / click / drink. This is, of course, a legacy of Jamaican toasting, except that dancehall makes up for it with melody, grime has more of a jolt, whereas it’s simply boring when put together with ATZ’s phlegmatic delivery.
Although the artist has had limited opportunities to promote the release or tour due to the reality of the pandemic, his music has reached a very wide audience. Suffice it to say that Miły ATZ received the Popkiller 2021 Discovery of the Year award and a nomination for the 2021 Fryderyk Award in the Phonographic Debut of the Year category.
Szymkowiak did not rest on his laurels and already in April 2022 he presented his second original release, entitled Roller. Its most popular recordings were the tracks co-written with well-known figures of the domestic rap scene – DON with Donguralesko and Money Move, featuring Dziarma. Fans and journalists alike appreciated the artistic development of Miły ATZ: ‘There are no obvious flaws. “Roller” leaves one with the satisfying feeling that at last they have succeeded, at last it sounds as it should’ – the No Culture portal summarised. Radio Meteor’s portal was also full of praise:
Text
You won’t find ostentation, puerility or vanity on this album. We have an album dripping with valuable content, which, apart from having fun, knows how to convey a very serious message, which we have a lot of in the second part of ‘Roller’.
A mere two years have passed and Miły ATZ has already provided fans with his third solo material, containing 28 full-length tracks, the two-disc Acid Moro. This is the most diverse album by the artist, who himself – under the pseudonym Misza – also contributed more than ten beats to it. In addition, he invited a large number of producers, rappers and vocalists to collaborate with him, which resulted in a wide-ranging work and even, in the opinion of many fans and reviewers, an overly expansive one. Wiktor Fejkiel commented this for the Interia portal:
Text
There is a method in this chaos, but to understand what Miły ATZ had in mind, one has to put in some work. I can confidently say that if the album had been limited to 12 to 15 tracks, it would have been much better and, above all, clearer.
Solo is not enough
On the hip-hop scene, Miły ATZ is very popular, both among fans and other artists, which is evident in his frequent collaborations. The rapper is closely associated with the UNDADASEA collective, and also co-founded the group Lowpass, which triumphed at the 2022 Polish Hip-Hop Music Awards as the best band of the year. In addition, Miły ATZ recorded the independently released 2022 album Ciśnienie Umiarkowane (Moderate Pressure), recorded with Mada. However, he branded it under the aforementioned nickname Misza. Szymkowiak is also a member of the duo Święty Bass, with two mixtapes to its credit, he is still active as a DJ and has also hosted a programme on the Newonce radio station. As a guest, he contributed, among other things, to Mielzky’s recording Co to Ten Rap?, for which he was awarded the prize for featuring of the year at the aforementioned Polish Hip-Hop Music Awards gala. In turn, the greatest popularity, looking at the numbers in streaming services, came from Szymkowiak’s contribution to the track CYPHER2020 from the album of the club2020 collective. The artists who invited Miły ATZ to collaborate with them included Pezet, Kukon, Tymek and Deemz, some of the most popular rap artists in Poland today. Launching into a real career in 2020, Miły ATZ emphasised the following:
Text
I have always dealt with people who would sooner punch me in the face than accept a lie in my lyrics. I have never had to explain myself to anyone close to me along the lines of: ‘you don’t understand, after all it’s just a creation and literary fiction’, because someone pointed out that my rap doesn’t cover reality.
Time has shown that he took the right path and managed to maintain both authenticity and musical quality. This has had the greatest impact on gradually consolidating his position and growing his fan base, which is now large enough for Miły ATZ to regularly release new albums and tour all over Poland.
Selected discography:
- 2020 – Czarny Swing
- 2022 – Roller
- 2024 – Acid Moro
