Fort Wayne's rising R&B artist Cambry H is releasing a new EP this week

If you've attended late-night events at Penny Drip or a handful of other local venues, you might have heard musician Cambry Hicks (Cambry H) DJing. But if you ask Hicks about this, he'll tell you that DJing is something he picked up "out of spite."

It was a way to make extra money when he lived in New York, and since he's returned to his hometown in Fort Wayne, it's a way he can bring a little big city culture to the community.

"I do it so I can play the type of music I want to hear," he says.

For Hicks, finding his culture and community within Fort Wayne has been a lifelong journey, one that drove him to start meeting friends and creating content online and one that continues to drive him to create – producing film, art and music that speaks to his soul.

Along with working his day job as Program Manager at Cinema Center, he works with creatives across the country and around the world to make films and his own genre-bending R&B music.

This week, he's releasing his second EP "001" at Astra Lounge on Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. The event will feature a track-by-track breakdown of his 5-song EP, exclusive merch and more, including his lead single "All Night."

We sat down with Hicks to learn more about his background, his work and what to expect at his EP release party.

Give us a little more background on you.

CH: I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, and I’ve also lived in New York off and on. When I moved back here most recently, I was a little lost at what to do, but I eventually started working at Cinema Center, and everything has snowballed from there. My job has afforded me a lot of flexibility to work on my music and my passions. Recently, in addition to making my own music, I’ve been helping Maxwell Krueger with Playbook Creative Agency, and I’ve been working on a film with Daniella Carter from the documentary “Kokomo City,” which is how I ended up at the GLADD Media Awards in New York in May. I got to walk the red carpet, and it was very fun.

Along with having flexibility in my work now, being on the internet is really how I’ve built my following and been able to do the things I’ve done, like get invited to cool events, go to Fashion Week, do multiple ad campaigns with Sephora (actually shot by another Fort Wayne native, Kelsey Martin). Growing up, I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere here, so I used the internet to find my people, and I had really big Tumblr and Twitter accounts in high school in the 2010s. 

Tell us more about your experience growing your audience on the internet.

CH: Being on the internet in the early- to mid-2010s was much easier than it is today. You weren’t curating a personality or making reels, as you see now. It was just the vibes back then. I was  – and still am — a huge fan of Rihanna, and I’ve always been into music, so I started off doing remixes of her songs or entire albums, and some of those caught on online. I wasn’t even singing at the time; I would just post beats.

Eventually, I did a remix of the song “Chasing Time” by Azealia Banks, and that got a lot of attention. Years later, I did another remix of one of her songs, and she reposted it, which went crazy on Twitter. But getting my music shared on the internet has never been calculated on my part. It was just me doing what I wanted to do, and if it worked, it worked. That’s how I create. If it doesn’t speak to me, I don’t do it. Which is why it’s taken me so long to go from my previous EP, “Libra,” which came out in 2018, all the way to 2024 now with the EP “001” that’s about to come out.

Tell us more about “001” and how it compares to your previous work.

CH: This project is a three-part series, and the reason for that is: the way we consume music now is different than it was even six years ago. People move on from new music quickly, and it’s changing the way musicians work in terms of output.

My first EP, “Libra,” did really well. One or two songs charted highly on SoundCloud in the “New & Hot” category, which was really cool to see. But I was about 20-years-old when I put that music out, and as I get older, I know more about my sound and what I want to say. Something that wasn’t prevalent in my music before were gender markers and making the music notably queer. I made all the music gender neutral back then because I didn’t see many queer artists in R&B sharing their work, and I knew that if I wanted people to hear my music on a wider scale, I couldn’t do that. So I didn’t put my image on the cover of the EP or anything. But fast forward to today, and you have artists, like Steve Lacy, Destin Conrad and KYLE. You have still very little visibility for queer R&B on a mainstream scale, but now that there is some representation, it makes it a lot easier to share my work and find an audience. And the art on this EP feels more cohesive with my music, too. The sound is more experimental, and I’m actually talking about things I want to talk about rather than just writing songs because they’re catchy, and the chorus is nice.

Tell us more about the music on “001.”

CH: Sonically, it’s a blend of all the things I like, so there’s a drum and bass element, especially on the first title track “001.” There’s an alternative adult/contemporary element in the last track, and then you have songs that mimic what Pharrell and Kelis would have been making in the early-2000s. You also have the single, “All Night,” which is very reminiscent of the late-2000s R&B Darkchild, Brandy and Bobby V. 

My favorite track is “Circles,” which features a sick guitar solo at the end that’s still on that early- to mid-2000s vibe. I really wanted to pull from the things I liked, and as much as I love R&B, I also love pop and electronic music. I play things when I DJ that don’t sound like the music I make. So there are a lot of influences I’ve pulled from to create this sound.

Something I did throughout the production was I wanted to use unconventional sounds. So in “Circles,” you hear sounds from a Linux computer error. And in the intro of the title track “001,” you hear a CD being put in and loading, and in “All Night,” there are these really funky chops that drive the beat inspired by the backbeat of “Clumsy” by Fergie.

Did you produce the music yourself?

CH: I sang, mixed and mastered most of the music myself, but I did have help from a producer, Kyle Dion, and a Mixing Engineer based in Greece, Giannis Moulakakis, who helped me create mixes for Dolby Atmos, where you can get a fully immersive audio experience. When you produce in a stereo format, you have the left and right speakers, but with Dolby Atmos, you can feel the music all around you, and I feel like people are able to hear it in a way that I visualized it when I was creating it. I wanted it to feel wide and spacey, and there’s only so wide and spacey you can get with two speakers, so Dolby Atmos really ups the experience. If you are listening on Apple Music or Title, you have the option to hear it in that format.

Tell us about the music video for “All Night.”

CH: The video for “All Night” is super cute. We’ll show it at the release party, and it will be available online that day at noon Eastern Time. In the music video, i really wanted to hone in on the aesthetic of the late-2000s to early-2010s, which I feel like is prevalent in the entire project. For instance, on the cover of the EP, I’m wearing a shirt made out of keyboard keys. I really wanted to use things I would have found interesting at the time when I was on Tumblr. The video itself resembles a screenshare when it first opens, and I made all the graphics myself. I wanted the video to resemble Omegle, and I filmed it with my friends on the internet who live everywhere around the world. 

Any pro tips for attending the release party?

CH: There is merch available on my website cambryh.com, and you can buy physical copies of the EP for $7.99. If you’re coming to the release party, there is special merch available. I’m living for the nostalgia, so there will be mp3 players that have the EP on it for sale.