Debut album and further career
In June 2016, their debut album entitled Pro8l3m was released. It was announced by the single 2040, the video for which referred to anime aesthetics, and then by the song Molly. They sold over 30,000 copies of the album, earning it a platinum record. The music arrangement resembles soundtracks from old science fiction films as Steez replaced samples from popular Polish songs with piano and synthesisers sounds. The music fits perfectly with the distinctive rap of Oskar, who shifts accents like in jazz syncopation. In the mentioned 2040, he raps how he imagines the future. While being interview on Programme Four of Polish Radio Oskar explained:
On a lyrical level, the listener is confronted with my visions, which are inspired by the impact of pop culture. I try to describe a forecast of the future based on futurologists’ theories.
His visions include sex, parties, and robberies, as if lifted from the films of Quentin Tarantino, but also psychotherapy and above all the omnipresence of surveillance due to technical progress. Filip Kalinowski summed up the album:
The closing songs of the album tell about virtual crimes, drones, orbital flights, cars with autopilot, and artefacts resembling those from science fiction. And most of them have already appeared in our everyday reality.
In June 2017, the released the EP Hack3d By GH05T 2.0, which was even more futuristic, showing a dark vision of life facilitated by the internet, a life in which privacy doesn’t exist and people willingly give up their identities to corporations and hackers. In five of the songs, Oskar raps about a future that has already come to exist in our lives from which there is no escape.
At the end of 2017, in an interview with NewOnce.pl, Steez told about their plans for a new album and about his time in Los Angeles – which didn’t slow down the preparations for the new release :
During my first stay in the US with Hemp Gru – it was in 2008 – I thought that I would like to stay there for some time during my music career. This cultural melting pot creates new, far-reaching sounds (...) What I do with PRO8L3M isn’t something that will interest the American market, because the music that I create is largely inspired by European culture.
In March 2018, the duo released Ground Zero Mixtape. It was their next big production after Pro8l3m. They managed to include 27 tracks that together form 57-minutes of hip-hop, techno, drum’n’bass and breakcore music of the turn of the 21st century. The sound is heavy, messy and distorted, and once again, contains a lot of samples. As usual, there was room for short recordings that imitated phone conversations, and in the lyrical layer – stories about sex, alcohol, drugs, and money. There were also lyrics about dealing with hardships in life and living up to expectations. High sales resulted in the first place on the OliS list (Polish Official Retail Sales Chart) and brought their next platinum record.
In December 2018, the group announced that their next album would be released in 2019.