Denver Duo Releases One of 2025’s Top Hip-Hop Albums

Kids raised in cities often have memories that make suburbanites blush.

When Chris “Time” Steele was growing up on the Northside, he and some friends found an abandoned gun. “We had found it in this forest area and were just shooting it off in an underpass under the highway,” he recalls. “After that, we just threw the gun in the lake.”

He reflected on the memory while writing the song “hey friends, have you heard the news,” which appears on Pushing the Portals, the new album from calm., the hip-hop duo featuring Steele as Time alongside Chavo “AwareNess” Trejo.

The song had him reminiscing about “friendships that fade away and nostalgia,” Time says, as well as “playing with alternate realities. Like, what if someone had got shot?

“Grief doesn’t follow linear time,” he adds. “We’re still stuck with a lot of our childhood traumas.”

Pushing the Portals explores those themes and more. The conceptual album, which is available to stream, sees Time and AwareNess tripping through different dimensions and philosophizing on life. “I met AwareNess in high school,” says Time, “and now we’ve toured all over the world.”

They’ve been making music together for 22 years now. Aside from touring through Europe and around the U.S., he says, “Our main milestone is maintaining a friendship and a shared goal.”

What’s just as impressive is the amount of music that calm. has released, including five albums this year alone. As with all their work, Time handles the bars while AwareNess makes the beats (and adds his own fair share of vocals). “We work synergistically, back and forth,” says AwareNess. “He writes stuff, and then I have something in mind, and it works. And then other times, I’ll make something that inspires something for him to do. We get in there and we bounce off each other really well.”

The result is perhaps the duo’s best release yet. “With calm. albums, we always try to do some world-building,” Time says, noting that the album’s cover is a continuation of the duo’s last release. “I wanted [Pushing the Portals] to be loosely based on time travel and multiverses. The more I went into the story, the more I was like, ‘We should have it actually change realities.’ It also turns into this story of our friend who’s there; he’s called Big Homie, and he disappears. And all the songs after that are time-bended into who Big Homie is.”

“I’m really proud of the whole album,” says AwareNess. “When I step back and look at it, I’m like, ‘This is pretty astonishing.’ You know, when you’re working on it, you’re just working. Then you take a step back and see the piece of work that you did. It’s like, ‘Wow. I kind of surprised myself.’ I think Chris did, too.”

The album kicks off with “The Toaster Beckons,” in which a deep voice (courtesy of AwareNess) details finding a toaster that, when plugged in, opens a portal. AwareNess and Time venture through the portal into another dimension, which they may not find their way out of. The title track follows, as the “calm boys” spit a searing salvo at their doubters. Tumbling through fractals and pushing on portals is dangerous, they’ve learned. However, the end of the song finds them using the toaster again, taking them to yet another space.

The concept may sound bizarre, but it doesn’t dilute the weighty lyricism that makes the album such a standout. “Dirty Lab Days” shows how they learned from “older heads” in the hip-hop scene, “going to battles, clownin’ and laughing” around the Northside.

“The Dirty Laboratory was a collective that was all Park Hill artists,” Time recalls, noting that AwareNess founded it alongside rapper H2O in the early 2000s, and at one point it included Time, Points, Logic and Extra Kool.

“I remember when Damon was at the Lab, he’d want to go get Black & Milds and we’d be by the Holly, getting Chinese food or at the taqueria,” he continues. “And then just AwareNess making beats; Points, he could freestyle forever. … They were kind of the elders to me. All these people were just like amazing artists that I learned so much from, and we wanted to take it back to that lab with the old-school beat, too.”

Time notes that “Dirty Laboratory is still our collective and represents where we started making art. It’s been fractured over the years by the prison industrial complex and people going their separate ways, but still our collective.” 

Writing the song had him “reminiscing on those times,” he says. “We’ve been doing music for so long; when our music first came out, we were selling CDs and stuff. So we’ve seen the technology change, but as far as the scene? It’s always been an amazing hip-hop scene in Denver.”

As natives, Time and AwareNess have a lot of love for the Mile High City, and they want to uplift their community and their friends. Bandcamp sales for their latest single, “Free Palestine, Abolish ICE,” a collaboration with Locksmith and DJ Pain, will be used “to help our friend Jeanette Vizguerra, who has been taken by ICE and is being held in Aurora,” Time says.

And calm.’s upcoming concert — on Sunday, November 30, at Bricks on Main in Longmont — is a mutual aid benefit to support the Food Not Bombs initiative.

The duo plans to have an official release show for Pushing the Portals sometime this winter, but you can dig into the poetic album in the meantime. The flow is unparalleled, and so is the breadth of sound. “Sitting by Your Tombstone” has an almost Appalachian folk feel in its cadence and instrumentation. The duo continues to demonstrate diverse sonics in “Am I Only My Pain?,” which is imbued with a dark industrial, electronic goth flavor.

“We just really wanted to expand the multiverse,” Time says. “Like, what if we were only a goth band? How would we approach it if we were actually a goth band for ten years? Or a country, rockabilly vibe on ‘Sitting by Your Tombstone.’ And I like all those different styles, too. So this was the first time we actually really did genre-bending, and it was really fun to do. It was also exploring how you could show grief and mourning through different styles.”

The distinct range of sound doesn’t break the album’s cohesion, but supplements it. Pushing the Portals grapples with grief, depression and nostalgia, offering perspectives that most people can relate to. “Depression Curry” is a poignant reflection on the throes of mental battles — when you just can’t seem to find the motivation to do anything, much less get out of bed: Rumi said a cut lets the light in / But when you’re in a black hole, the light bends / I reply, ‘But what if the wound is the light then?’ / He said, ‘Knowledge begins where sight ends.’

“Flight Risk,” meanwhile, is about the instant gratification that contemporary artists can desire: I don’t wanna be online / I wanna touch grass, remain in it / My time, I’m reclaiming it / My mind, I’m reshaping it / My synapses, I’m retraining ’em

It’s about dedicating the gift of time to creating art, pure and simple, without motives for fame or glory. As he says in the song, Time doesn’t want a Grammy (although that’d be nice, obviously); he just wants to bend to an assiduous need to create. “On the one hand, it’s the pinnacle of when we burn the sigil to become famous artists,” Time says. “It’s kind of like, when you finally blow up and see that the whole hill of money and fame is really just gold-plated bullshit. It’s also tied in to being an underground artist, too, when I talk about how there are three devils in the world and one of them is expectation. … There’s so much money to be made by giving you a false expectation.”

Pushing the Portals wraps up with “Braiding the Timelines.” Perhaps the album’s best, the song muses on the metaphysical essence of quantum physics, beginning with a mystical instrumental before Time opens the first bars. Constant existential questions are tossed throughout the song: Am I in the past or am I in the future? / Break the timelines, weave the needle in the suture / Am I in the void or am I in the present? / Break the timelines, sew ’em back together

“Did I write this song or did the song write me?” Time asks in the track. That’s a question that may as well be asked of the album itself. Pushing the Portals was informed by memories — from finding a gun as kids to hanging at the Dirty Laboratory — that may have listeners examining their own take on nostalgia.

“I was playing with the question: Is your trauma making the art, or is the art healing the trauma?” Time explains. “There’s probably not a right or wrong answer to that. It’s kind of like an infinity sign — they inform each other.”

Calm. plays Bricks on Main, 471 Main Street, Longmont, 6-9 p.m. Sunday, November 30. Visit bricksonmain.com for more information.