Akeem Joseph, better known as AK The Savior, was born on June 13, 1991, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. A year earlier, Marlon Fung, better known as Issa Gold, was born on July 26, 1990, just a few blocks away from AK. Ever since the ’80s, Flatbush has primarily been a place where immigrant families from the Caribbean and Africa settle. This was no different for AK and Issa’s families. AK’s roots lay in Trinidad, whereas Issa’s lay in Guyana, with a half-Chinese father. Flatbush raised both of them multicultural, restless, and with music.
They first crossed paths more than a decade later, in 2007. A mutual friend brought Issa to AK’s place one day to smoke together. Conversations switched from weed to psychedelics quickly. At that time in Flatbush, curiosity about these kinds of things kind of marked you as an outsider in the city. Being young, Black, and interested in mushrooms and acid wasn’t the path they’d expected. Issa had already been experimenting with his childhood friend Zombie Juice, now known from the Flatbush Zombies. They grew up in the same building, after all. AK was immediately interested. The friendship formed around the idea of seeing further: treating altered states of mind not as an escape from their own world, but as an investigation. Spirituality, consciousness, and looking for the edges of what felt possible, in a place where you often had to stay practical and use your street smarts.
AK had been rapping since he was a kid — eleven, maybe twelve years old. In the beginning he used to go by the name The Underachiever. Issa came to rapping later. He studied political science and philosophy. He thought about writing a lot, but only started recording around late 2011. Eventually a producer put the pieces together and told them they should rhyme together. Their chemistry was already there, so in 2011 they became The Underachievers.
The name stuck because it was an honest one. Mainstream eyes might have just seen two young Black kids from Flatbush chasing mushrooms and ideas as underachieving. Their early music mixed frantic rhyme styles with production that felt heavy and experimental — psychedelic, but without losing the classic gritty New York sound. Tracks like “Gold Soul Theory” and “Herb Shuttles” started circulating online and in the local scene. One of their videos caught the ear of Flying Lotus. After listening to about twenty seconds of their music, he decided to sign The Underachievers to Brainfeeder in 2012. The signing felt very sudden, even though the groundwork had been in the works for a while.
In 2013 The Underachievers locked in. Indigoism arrived in February — a now classic and legendary mixtape that announced their spiritual, consciousness-driven approach. Even in a heavily crowded New York scene, this stood out. The music was full of ideas about higher awareness, the third eye, and rejecting the limits of the self. Later that year, Lords of Flatbush followed. The project was more energetic and sharper: a deliberate counterweight, so they wouldn’t be boxed into one lane of “conscious” or “trippy” rap. The tapes earned critical attention. XXL, Stereogum, and others started to take notice. Suddenly The Underachievers were part of the conversation — not just about Flatbush, but about New York. They were moving in the same lane as Pro Era and the Flatbush Zombies.
In 2014 The Underachievers formed Clockwork Indigo and released a short EP with the Flatbush Zombies. A natural collaboration: shared streets, shared friends, and shared interest in pushing past the surface value of things. The same year The Underachievers dropped their debut album, Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium. The album reached the Top 20 on both the R&B/Hip-Hop and Rap album charts. The title and concept of the album felt fitting — endings and beginnings, doors that open into different rooms of the self. Portugal. The Man appeared on one of the tracks. The record carried the same restless energy and hunger as the mixtapes, but there was a clearer sense of ambition.
The following year gave us Evermore: The Art of Duality, a project deliberately split into a light side and a dark side. It was a very mature and autobiographical project that maps the push and pull between the elevated and the grounded, the spiritual and the everyday. It peaked in the Top 10 on both the R&B/Hip-Hop and Rap charts. It feels like an emotional yet powerful album, balancing the cerebral and the physical. After this, Renaissance arrived in 2017 — yet another step in their ongoing evolution.
The Underachievers stayed close to their inner circle. They contributed to the larger Beast Coast collective, a supergroup made up of The Underachievers, Pro Era, and the Flatbush Zombies. The 2019 collective album Escape From New York felt like a culmination of years of shared energy: a statement from Brooklyn artists who had grown up together and refused to leave behind the borough’s spirit. Their solo work continued on the side. Issa released Conversations With A Butterfly. AK put out multiple projects under AKTHESAVIOR. Their music kept evolving, yet they never abandoned the core questions that started their careers.
The Underachievers never became a massive commercial force. They didn’t need to. Their catalog — Indigoism, Lords of Flatbush, Cellar Door, Evermore, Renaissance, and the rest — carries specific frequencies that still resonate with people looking for something beyond the usual. They helped define a particular strain of 2010s Brooklyn hip-hop: ambitious, hungry, introspective, and willing to risk looking strange in order to see further. In a moment when New York rap was looking for new voices after a quieter period, they, alongside their peers, helped reopen the conversation about what New York could sound like.
The Underachievers are still active today, with the Homecoming album dropping in 2025 and a single called “Matrix” with A$AP ANT and Jules Frequency dropping in late August 2026. Their name still fits them in the best way. Underachievers by the standards of a world that measures success in numbers and surface achievements. Yet overachievers by the standards of anyone who values depth and curiosity.
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