When The Cool Kids announced their upcoming Shark Week album in early January, many of their fans, including Tyler, the Creator, were pleased to hear that the duo was reuniting for their first full-length studio album since 2011’s When Fish Ride Bicycles. Recently, The Cool Kids’ Mikey Rocks spoke about the group’s upcoming project and Tyler, the Creator’s enthusiasm for it. 

“I’m a fan of Tyler’s as well, so it was cool to see him show that love, especially with all the success of Odd Future,” Rocks said in an interview with Spin. “I’m glad to hear that we had that influence on him, to spark some of his ideas and help him find his own lane.” 

While Rocks said he does not know if Tyler will contribute to Shark Week, he said “it’s definitely possible.” After discussing Tyler’s potential involvement, Rocks confirmed that IAMSU! and the HBK Gang are slated to be on Shark Week

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Shark Week is the upcoming album’s title due to “biters,” Rocks says, as well as a continued aquatic theme.

“I’m a big fan of animals, and we’ve kept a theme of always relating our album titles to fish somehow,” he said. “To us, the fish theme is a deeper meaning than most people would understand. You know what sharks do? Sharks are biters. We feel like after our first couple of mixtapes, a lot of people started biting our style, biting our look, biting our music, so now we’re addressing all of that stuff.”

Rocks says the first time he saw biters, he thought it was “weird.” 

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“That was so weird, because I’m just a kid that came from the south suburbs of Chicago, so I was coming into the game thinking people would treat it like they do in the streets,” Rocks said. “In person, when you see someone do something cool, it makes you want to do something cool yourself, but not just copy them. But when we got into rap, people were copying point blank, and they don’t have any shame about it, and other people would make them feel like it was okay. It was really weird to see that in people I looked up to and people who were famous before me. It alerted me to what kind of waters we were in — there’s a lot of sharks out here, and people will bite, so you got to protect your style and let people know they can’t just take your shit. When you have a group like us that are filled with endless ideas, we’re like a gold mine to biters. So now we’ve got to stamp our shit real hard before anyone else can claim it as their own.” 

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