Buckshot: The Suite Life

Irish rapper Buckshot has an ambivalent relationship with the internet, his home and sometimes his own music.

After striking gold last year with his single, “Fever,” the mega-viral song featuring Fakemink, the 24-year-old artist has seen international fandom and criticism. However, he is much more than that one song. A now ex-member of Sematary’s Haunted Mound crew, the rapper is navigating a reinvigorated solo career full of differing types of online backlash, all while anticipating an upcoming European tour. 

Buckshot FaceTimes me from a hotel room in Paris. For him it is 3 p.m. and for me it is 9 a.m. He is sitting up in his bed and seems rather relaxed.

For fans who cannot get enough of him, their main gripe is that he does not release enough music.

“No, like, yeah, I don’t, bro,” says Buckshot. “I just kind of agree with that, bro. There's nothing I can really say.”

This bluntness would set a tone for the rest of the interview; Buckshot has a hard time not being honest. 

Later in the interview, when asked if he’ll be releasing music more consistently now, he said, “I want to bro, but like, shitttt, life gets in the way,” before immediately changing his mind. “Bro, like life doesn’t even get in the way.”

“I’m just fuckin’ lazy, bro,” he mutters.

Here, what he deems laziness is quickly revealed to be more akin to a habit of self-criticizing.

“I don't know, bro. Sometimes I like the stuff I make and sometimes I don’t.”

As of writing this, however, he has just released a new single, “Backseat,” and its music video.

Buckshot recently announced his 2026 European tour. Many fans wonder what he is even going to perform, saying that he does not have enough solo music to grant a concert, let alone a tour.

They will be pleased to know that he is working on a project to release before showtime.

“I want to drop an EP soon, before the [tour], that's why I'm going on tour, you know what I mean? … in terms of sound, gonna get away from what I was doing back in, like, from my previous drops. I'm trying to evolve, you know?”

“So, I have a tour coming up in Europe, hitting a bunch of different cities,” he continues. “First solo tour ever. It's kind of going to be, like, a staple of me as, like, artistically for which direction I'm going with this EP. And, yeah, which way I want to go with music.”

Buckshot started his music career as part of the aforementioned Haunted Mound. In late 2020, he was the first member to really “join” the group. At the time, the Mound only consisted of Sematary, as Ghost Mountain had started to distance himself from the project. Buckshot created visual art for the group before he joined as a rapper.

Buckshot left the collective sometime around late 2025.

Like most former Haunted Mound members, Buckshot has never publicly commented on why he left and never made an announcement regarding his departure. For a while, there was even debate as to whether he had actually left or not.

“Nah, I'm not part of it. Um, but I mean, like, I've got really nothing to say about it, to be honest.”

“… It wasn't really abrupt,” he says. “I mean, like it was just kind of, like, more natural than, like… you know what I mean? I didn't have to, like, make a statement or like, fucking, really do anything. I feel like, you know, I just need to let the music speak for itself.”

Buckshot says a series of creative differences are what led up to the split; he is interested in pursuing new sounds.

“Like, obviously I want to go for more like, upbeat- I feel like all their shit’s kinda like… grim. I don't really want to put the grim shit out.”

The first stop of this year’s Europe tour is in Dublin, Ireland, which is around an hour north of Wicklow, the county where Buckshot was born.

“I call it, like, sub-rural,” he says. “Like, I'm in the fields and the mountains and shit. Like, there's not really shit around me and I think that's definitely a driving factor of, like, the type of music that I make. In terms of writing and stuff and in terms of, like, kind of the feeling that I put out there with the music.”

The artist, while not completely fluent in the Irish language, or Gaeilge, has been learning it his whole life and can hold a conversation.

As a child, Buckshot would be sent during the summer to live in a Gaeltacht for two weeks. A Gaeltacht is an area of Ireland where the Irish language is what’s naturally and predominantly spoken. During these trips, if you spoke any English, you’d be sent home.

“It was fucking fun, bro,” he smiles. “You get fucking shipped into a house with some other people from wherever you’re from. Sometimes it’s people you know, sometimes it’s not. I went there with Oscar[18] before … I think as an Irish person growing up, you definitely need to experience that.”

During his upbringing, Buckshot’s musical taste was widely shaped by bands his father played in the house.

“He saw Lizzy Grant before she was Lana Del Rey, before her debut album came out. [He was] into The Cure and, like, The Rolling Stones … Definitely a very big concert-goer.

And, like, definitely part of the first generation of the punk scene in Ireland. Like, Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash and, like, the Sex Pistols. He would have followed their kind of, like, rise to fame. He would have been from a background that was very Catholic,” Buckshot continued.

“That first wave of punk would have been, um, ‘Fuck the system.’ … Especially in Ireland, which was very heavily dictated by the Catholic Church back in the day. And we're talking about, like, 1980- Like, he was born in 63 … So, 60s, 70s, 80s for sure. He would have grown up with that type of punk wave. A lot of, like, Ramones. A lot of fucking, like, Joy Division. That type of culture, you know?”

Around Buckshot’s early teens he started listening to music that he discovered through older people around him, such as his cousin. He got into types of rock such as emo and screamo through Kerrang! Magazine and Kerrang! TV.

“I was heavily into that,” says Buckshot. “And, like, My Chemical Romance, Sleeping With Sirens, uh... Pierce The Veil … It was, like, the scene culture almost. Back in, yeah, like, 2010s almost. Early 2010s. I was definitely influenced by that as well.

And then I'd say, as I got older, it was, like, the friends I was hanging out with more. I was heavily involved in, like, the skate scene or whatever. Like Odd Future … I remember one of my friends showing me Yung Lean’s Facebook where he was dropping music and thinking, like, ‘this is the coolest shit ever.’ 

Like he didn’t even have YouTube at that point, you know? It was, like that song ‘Greygoose’ on his fucking Facebook.“

Growing up, Buckshot went to Catholic school for almost ten years, but he does not feel it has shaped his music much at all.

“It's the norm where I'm from, just going to a Catholic school,” he says. “And it's not heavily practiced or really, like, acknowledged too much. Because it's just what, fucking, people do. Would I identify as Catholic? Probably, just for identification reasons. But would I practice? Fuck no.

I mean, like, when it's been bad, I'd fucking go to the fucking church. And I have been before. But I feel like it's more of, like, a coping mechanism where it’s almost like it's better than going to fucking therapy or some shit.

And it's nice to belong in, like, a community or whatever. Like, have that part of my identity, for sure.”

Buckshot’s parents, he says, are pretty much atheists. Although he is not a practicing Catholic, he says he would never be an atheist. 

“Any religion, it doesn't matter who you're, like, a part of, like, there is a reason it survived and existed this long,” he says.

He feels that it’s natural to desire a place where you can feel accepted and to believe you have somewhere to go after death.

“I feel like it's a pretty healthy thing to have until it comes into, like, until it gets to deeper and twisted than that, you know what I mean?”

In a previous interview, the artist has said that books were a big part of what influenced his work. Lately he’s been into “western philosophy type shit” and Charles Bukowski.

“He’s fucking goated, dude. He’s so good. Yeah, his poetry and shit? ‘Love is a Dog from Hell,’ so fucking fire.”

Buckshot recites some lines from one of Bukowski’s interviews and laughs.

“Yeah, I've been reading that a lot. I've been, like, watching a lot of documentaries about his life and shit. I like, uh, audiobooks too. Because I don't have to fucking do all the work, you know? I can just, fucking, lie there and listen to it without even doing shit too, you know?”

I asked Buckshot if he had ever read any James Joyce, the man who probably holds the title of Ireland’s most famous writer – Oscar Wilde coming in at a close second.

“Bruh, I tried to. Like, ‘Ulysses,’ bro? Bruh, no, like, that's way too fucking hard, bro. I've tried to tap into that shit. Like, what the fuck is he talking about, bro?

I'm in Paris right now. Oscar Wilde's buried here, so I'm gonna go to the fucking grave. Give him a kiss on the fucking grave with the lipstick and shit.”

We talked a little more about Joyce. Buckshot is a fan of the 1987 film, ’The Dead,” which is based on Joyce’s famous short story. He has also read the story in its playscript form.

“… It's so fire. Yeah, definitely shout out James Joyce.”

Speaking of the dead, one of Buckshot’s most infamous photos is of him holding a shotgun under his chin with his thumb on the trigger. The picture is from three years ago and still gets shared by fans.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, that got posted on ‘r/idiotswithguns’ and it's one of the top posts on the subreddit,” he says. “That got taken down from instagram. And it was loaded too.”

Buckshot starts to crack up.

In the photo, Buckshot is wearing a shirt with Bobby Sands on it, the Irish Republican Army volunteer who died on hunger strike while imprisoned during the Troubles.

The conversation now became more about the border and the Republic of Ireland.

“Honestly, if you go to the Republic of Ireland — and you can put this on the fucking record, I don't care — nobody fucking gives a shit about United Ireland. As far as I know, bro, nobody fucking cares about United Ireland. It's more of like a patriotic thing.

And like, honestly, it doesn't make the most sense in terms of like — I’ve looked into this before, of course I have — It doesn't make the most sense in terms of like, I mean, if you look at the biggest, like, people who are on benefits for the UK, it's mostly Northern Ireland.

So it wouldn't make too much sense uniting Ireland in terms of, like, taxes and stuff like that. Because like, what do they add anymore? Their biggest export was fucking shipbuilding and that’s like since the Titanic.

Like, what the fuck? Like, what do they contribute to? Like, what can they give us instead of pride?

Yeah, it would be nice, of course. But like the flip side is what can they do for, like, the current people who live in Ireland, you know what I mean? I don't hear too much about fucking conflict in Northern Ireland anymore. It would be like occasionally, but honestly, I think people are fucking tired. And like, people are just, like, done with all that.

Everything’s, like, functioning the way it should be. I'm speaking from my perspective of living southern of the border. Maybe people up there would have a different feeling or sentiment towards it. But yeah, that's just how I feel.”

Buckshot even feels that because Northern Ireland abides by the UK’s laws, artists and nightlife may thrive more there than they would in Ireland. 

“It’s, like, cool to be Irish when you're outside of Ireland,” he says.

For young people, and artists especially, Buckshot asks, “What the fuck has [Ireland] done for me?” 

“Especially when I was like trying to, like, starting out with music and stuff like that. There's still kind of that small village mentality where if you're going outside of the box or like trying to lead a life that's going not really traditional or whatever, it would be kind of, not really looked down upon, but talked about. Like gossiped about.”

The artist has faced his own fair share of pressure to conform to traditional Irish life. He even tried to go to college before pursuing music instead. His parents didn’t really take his career seriously until he was touring.

“It’s looked down on until it works,” he says.

It would be an understatement to say Buckshot’s music defies the rigid, Irish Catholic lifestyle. Drugs are a central theme of his lyrics and a big point of conversation amongst listeners. Many fans inaccurately tend to chalk his lack of releases up to him being a struggling drug addict. 

“I don't know, bro. I mean, like, I do [drugs] sometimes, but, like, people like, I don't know. It's definitely been blown up out of proportion online with, like, the amount or with, you know, the frequency that I use. Like I get called fucking ‘junkie’ all the time and shit like that. 

But really, I play into it and, like, my fucking music doesn't help with that stuff. But I mean, definitely in real life, like it’s definitely more like a side thing.”

This general perception the fans have can be frustrating for the artist. “Random ass people I’ve never met before in my life,” he says.

Controversy around the artist is not limited to speculation of drug abuse, however. The shotgun picture is a classic example of Buckshot’s approach towards the internet and public image.

“I mean, it kind of applies to like how I think of everything online,” he says. “Like nothing really fucking is real or like matters too much. I guess that's kind of me being more of a luddite than I give out to be, because it kind of does [matter], because it's what my whole career is based on. I’m, like, only here because of, fucking, what I've done online, you know?”

Recently, Buckshot even lifted a photo from the Haunted Mound subreddit and posted it to his own Instagram. The picture is of a Buckshot t-shirt on fire. He captioned it, “Buckshot Failed Musician.”

“ … Bro, like, come on, bro. Like, who the fuck am I? Like, for real, bro. Why are you getting so fucking heated up? Like bro, the picture's fire, of course I'm going to fucking post it.”

Buckshot starts to laugh again.

“Come on, bro. What the fuck did I do? What did I do? Like, stop giving me content,” he chuckles.

At this point in our FaceTime call, Buckshot walks to the bathroom and says, “Hold on, I’m gonna piss real quick.” He, courteously, mutes his microphone.

A month ago, Buckshot liked an Instagram meme of himself and musician Weiland. It reads, “HEY BRO LETS DROP ONE GOOD ALBUM THEN BE BUMS FOR THE REST OF OUR CAREERS.”

“Dude, I’m trying to work with Weiland,” says Buck. “Let’s drop some fucking songs. Fuck these motherfuckers.”

“I’ll get ‘Packrunner’ Weiland back, I swear to God, bro, watch me. In the studio with Weiland, watch what happens. But yeah, me and Weiland have been back and forth, I’m tryna make some fucking music with him. I fucking love that kid, like, I fuck with him.”

When it comes to his sarcastic approach to the internet and specifically social media, Buckshot says, “You either have it or you don’t.”

“Like, I’m famous on Tumblr.”

The artist plans to drop his EP in the very near future.

When I ask him what fans can expect from this EP he says, “New music soon!” and laughs. “Yeah, no, It'll be like more of the new shit that I've been dropping, for sure.”

Although he’s still young and prefers the fast-paced life of somewhere like New York — he just lived there for three months — Buckshot hopes to retire in his homeland and be fluent in the language.

“I’d have, like, a bungalow with a thatched roof and I'd go out every, like, every day I'd cut turf to put on the fire. I would like, uh, mend stone walls. Yeah, fucking, like by the sea, by the cliffs and shit. And I’d, like, you know, go to the pub and shit.

I would not be locally known. Globally hated,” he chuckles.

The internet can be an exhausting place. In the corner where underground rap intersects with online debate, the internet can also be an incredibly parasocial place. It may seem ridiculous to view forums and comment sections as the modern-day Socratic Seminar. But artists like Buckshot and all of his contemporaries exist in an in-between digital realm that doubles as the pillar of their careers. How it is utilized is up to the artist, but the internet is their industry until an alternative comes along.

When asked if Buckshot had a message for the readers, he said:

“No.”