Lance Butters

Lance Butters is a German battle rapper whose identity is undisclosed, and is publicly seen wearing a gold mask similar to the Marvel superhero Iron Man. His lyrics are aggressive, arrogant, and violent, but his rapping style is slow and laid-back, and properly enunciated. He often raps about drugs, and is frequently seen puffing on a blunt. Following a lengthy build-up that included a handful of EPs from 2011 through 2013, Butters narrowly missed the top of the German chart with his grim 2015 debut album, Blaow, and three years later made a full return with the bleaker ANGST. Born in 1988 in a German town called Ulm, Butters began rapping around 2006, and competed in the online battle-rap tournament VBT in 2010. He started releasing free tracks and uploading videos to YouTube that year, but he quit the battle-rap scene the following year in order to pursue more widespread success. He formed Frank Castle Cooking Gang in 2011 with producer Bennett On and fellow rapper coru, releasing an online EP called cooking sum. Butters’ self-released 2012 EP Selfish was well received, and in 2013 he signed a contract with Four Music, the label founded by German rap pioneers Die Fantastischen Vier. Butters’ first release for the label was the Futureshit EP, a moderate commercial success. Butters announced that he was recording a full-length, and despite teasing that the album would take his sound into a more pop-friendly direction, Blaow found him staying true to his sound. The 2015 album was a success, hitting number two on the German album chart. After a 2016 stopgap EP, Die Welle, Butters completed ANGST. The comparatively darker and more reflective LP arrived in 2018. ~ Paul Simpson