Mathias is on an ambitious quest to boost our economy.

For starters, the rapper and the other members of the Lower Mainland’s Lazy Weekend collective are out promoting hip-hop events across the city, including this week’s release party for his new Pray for Nyx EP.

Backed by a club-ready boom, the digital release’s opening track, “North West”, reps all the glories of Beautiful British Columbia, “from the valley to the coast”. Considering the party track’s bushel of references to “smokin’ trees” and puffin’ “the mary”, the producer is also a serious consumer, one who’s clearly bought his fair share of local green.

“I definitely have a very passionate relationship with weed,” the North Vancouver–based MC tells the Straight in a Gastown coffee-shop conversation just hours ahead of hitting the studio for his next recording session.

Adhering to the ethos “Write high, edit sober,” he continues: “My most powerful, creative efforts usually involve some weed in my body.”

On a surface level, the THC count would seem high enough in Mathias to warrant that Lazy Weekend tag, but the musician is in his most productive phase yet. 

Born and raised in Kelowna, he began as a drummer in a high-school jazz band, but progressed to producing beats after falling for the deep drops of the dubstep scene. While he took a shot at studying science in college, a family member’s cancer scare shook Mathias enough to make him follow his heart and head into the arts.

He moved further west to attend the North Shore’s Harbourside Institute of Technology to study audio engineering, where he linked up with future Lazy Weekend associates like producer Moxsa.

“I just realized that I’ve got to make the best of this time,” Mathias recalls, adding that his brother has since recovered from the disease. “All these futures that I had planned out for myself that were given to me by other people, my parents for example, they didn’t feel right. It just gave me fire to follow my dreams.”

Pray for Nyx is Mathias’s third EP to drop since he moved to the Lower Mainland at the end of 2014. While last year’s Moxsa-produced Saga Birth release trafficked in left-field beats and jazzy flourishes of sax and guitar, the self-prepped Pray for Nyx delivers a series of energized AutoTune symphonies.

“I want to help inspire healthy change in people, and help them wake up, but at the same time I want to make people rage. At my shows, I want to see people moshing and just going crazy,” he says of handing out a thicker block of beats this time around. “I guess that goes back to my dubstep roots—I love that heavy, melt-your-face-type music.”

While the EP’s sonics are ready to crack domes with hammer-down drum-machine claps, or keep you twisted with hazy smears of synth, Mathias’s lyrics have a gentler spirit. His spitting style’s got a brag-heavy swagger, but he’s generally pushing a positive message.

The rapper’s on-his-grind ethic surfaces on most tracks, whether he’s talking about hitting the booth in “North West” or working his fingers bloody writing rhymes on the faux-brass-blastin’ “No Enemies”. The golden swirl of “Alchemy” also finds him pushing his onward-and-upward agenda: “If you’re pessimistic, we can’t be friends.”

“If you’re going to be outspokenly negative, or talk down on what I believe in, I’m not going to bother to tell you that you’re wrong; you’re never going to see me again. I don’t have time to waste on trying to explain it,” he says. “I just try to surround myself with the most positive people that I can. I try to surround myself with people I look up to, so I can learn from them.”

As the conversation wraps, the frizzy-haired wordsmith pulls out a notebook, pledging to jot down some ideas ahead of getting behind the mike. Though Pray for Nyx has just arrived, he’s got other projects coming down the pipeline.

A newly launched website’s blog section will have him waxing on social issues he doesn’t touch on in his music. (“There’s so much shit going on in society that I’m just not down with,” he notes.)

Next year, he’s aiming to drop two more releases. The first, titled Zeus, will have him tapping into more trap-style sonics and a “larger-than-life vibe”. Following that, he’ll deliver The Reward Pathway, named after the human brain’s regulation of dopamine.

“If you’re hungry and you eat a meal, your body is going to signal that it feels good to eat that,” Mathias explains. “At the same time, I feel that I’m on the reward pathway. Since I’ve chosen to follow this calling within myself, not listening to anyone else and believing in myself, the place that I’ve gone to now feels surreal.

“You make these decisions, and you follow yourself,” he adds. “Even if it seems totally unrealistic and impossible, in some way the universe is going to make that happen for you.”

Mathias headlines a release party for Pray for Nyx tonight (December 1) at Studio Records (919 Granville Street).