NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts

Maxo Kream (2022x28)

: 24, 2022

“I ain’t about to be on all that preaching s***, but Imma tell you this,” Maxo Kream says during his Tiny Desk (home) concert. “I came from nothing! The mud. Anything you wanna do, put your mind to it.” The sentiment isn’t groundbreaking, but if you’ve made it to the point in the video at which he says this, it’s impossible not to feel the passion of these words. His set is one of the first times we’ve seen the Houston native play with a band. They set up shop in an H-Town performance space, and the stripped-down aesthetic brings things that could be easily lost in his album recordings. The rawness of his voice cuts straight through the live instrumentation.