How fragments Transformed One Week of Collaboration Into a Debut EP

During the last week of 2025, ten independent musicians gathered on Discord voice chats and late night hangouts to create their ambitious and wildly experimental EP, super swag music.

During the last week of 2025, stvphn was hanging out with several friends on a Discord server voice chat when they decided to make a cypher. Quickly, he recruited chtha, syron, ASTA, and Davin Dot to put down vocals on the track. A cypher, as Davin told me, is a track that does not have a traditional song structure. This music is free-flowing, often with hooks and verses running on each other like extended bits of dialogue don’t end.

“That happens with most of our cyphers,” syron said, noting that music is often made on Discord voice chats. “We make too many of them. This one was the same as all the ones before it.”

This one, like many cyphers the friends make together, came together quickly. ASTA estimated that he spent about 5 minutes writing his verse. “That’s the fastest I’ve ever written one.”

But this one felt a little different. Davin heard something electric as the cypher came together. “It had a good hook,” he noted. He took the track to stvphn, a producer for many independent artists in their friend group, who came back with an interesting idea.

​“What if we just make an EP in a week?” he asked Davin, who would become a co-director with stvphn on the project.

​And so, over the next week, ten artists came together over Discord voice chats and late-night hangouts to record verses for a project that no one really knew what would turn into.

This week, the group, known as fragments, will release that music on streaming services as their debut EP, super swag music. The title, several members will tell you, is incredibly stupid. “I think the name itself shows how little we take ourselves too seriously,” chtha admitted. “The fact that our debut EP is called super swag music is the funniest part.”

The title, kinn said, “is straight up vibes. Each song has a super cool sound that can fit different vibes and emotions.” That’s what makes it swag.

Originally, the title came from stvphn. Often after hearing a new verse added to the cypher and other songs, he’d say, without any irony, “This is super swag.” But he admitted,  “It’s funny, it’s witty. Right now, when I make music, I want to make something fun. I don’t want to think too hard about it. I want to keep it simple, straightforward, and enjoyable.”

And if the creative direction seems deeply unserious, the music is bright and very self-aware.

From the very first track, there are shots of pure adrenaline, like on the bouncy hyperpop track “1-2-3 (COUNT!)”. “Count the times you’ve wanted to be me,” Davin Dot flexes with the confidence of an MVP holding court at a press conference.

It can also be sexy, like “DANGEROUS”, a track that brings out some unexpected dynamics from an artist like brynne. Recording that track, kinn told me, was so fun because of how much freedom he was given. “Funny enough, when I was recording my lines for this track, both Davin and stvphn said, ‘make it spicier’. You don't understand how happy I was to hear that. And of course, the spice was delivered. So I hope the listeners enjoy the sass and spunk I brought to the song . And that's on periodt!”

On the EP closer “WORLDS APART”, the music slips into an EDM crush of euphoria. That song, which stvphn first brought to Jelex, is exemplary of how innovative fragments can be. “When I hear everyone’s parts, it’s obvious that we’re all unique in our own ways,” Jelex said. “We don’t sound alike. We all have our own flow and our own lyrics that resonate with us.”

​The key, the members tell me, is that the music and artists are all incredibly diverse in their talents.

“We were trying to fit the word ‘swag’ with the music, even when that just meant dark R&B sounds,” Davin told me. “stvphn and I both know our friends and know what their strengths are, so we genuinely just made five beats that fit the name and matched whoever would work on them.”

Davin and stvphn also made creatively ambitious choices with how they directed the music. They put chtha, an artist who is deep into R&B, on “MENTAL”, a dark, brooding track that amplified his strengths. They gave ASTA, an artist Davin sees as “extremely versatile”, a Gwen Stefani-style track with “DANGEROUS”. Jelex was given “WORLDS APART” to showcase his EDM skills.

“You can really hear what everyone brings to the table. It’s people doing what they do best, but either in a more fun way, with a twist, or by doing something a little outside their comfort zone,” brynne said. “Hearing Shane on ‘I KNOW’ is wild, because I know this guy for making yearning R&B. Now he’s getting freaky on a track.”

syron echoes this thought. “Genuinely, I think the connecting thread is that it’s a flex that we can make so many different sounds feel cohesive,” he told me. “Most of us are making completely different music from one another. If you go through our discographies, it all sounds different. But somehow we put out this project, and it all makes sense together.”

fragments’ directors Davin Dot and stvphn

It seems fitting that for a group built on fluctuation and experimentation, all of Fragment’s members met in online spaces.

Some members, like brynne and ASTA, met on a bixby server. “I basically lived on the bixby server,” ASTA said sheepishly. “What’s crazy is that not even a year into knowing each other, we made our first cypher together. It wasn’t as a group — it was more of a joke cypher with a whole bunch of other people.”

Davin entered the friend group a short time later, when the friends made that  joke cypher, which samples “hypocritical” by Joon & starfall. “It’s kind of like Brockhampton meeting in the Kanye West subreddit, but modern,” Davin said, referencing the strangely similar – and funny – way Brockhampton’s members met one another.

Fragments is global in scope: stvphn, Davin, brynne, and kinn live in California. Jelex from Singapore, syron and vylarem from Vancouver, and Kuiper from Toronto make up the group’s international members. There’s Midwest representation with ASTA, who’s based in Chicago, while chtha is based on the East Coast in Virginia.

Yet the group is built on deep friendship and genuine respect among its members. Though they are each soloists, all of Fragment’s members have embraced collaboration throughout their careers. There is a strength, they’ve learned, in finding friends in these spaces.

jelex and kuiper

“I feel like the only reason we even came together is that we love this, and I think we all bring that same love to the project,” ASTA said. “You can hear it in every song.”

The group’s name was also inspired by that transient friendship. At first, the members told me, they were looking at a mixture of meme-based and serious names. They looked into the Greek word for heaven. One member joked that they should call themselves EAST OF EDEN, a play on WEST OF EDEN, a popular boy band based out of Seattle, with which several Fragment members are friends.

But a friend of theirs, by the name of Kanny, eventually pitched the name Fragments. “That was the only one that really stuck,” ASTA remembered. “Each one of us makes up part of the group. We’re one entity.” The name made sense, Davin said, “because it had layers to it. Each of us is a fragment.”

Some members weren’t a fan of the name at first. But the more they talked about what the group could achieve together and how their polarities somehow, strangely, made sense, the name started to make more sense. “I compared it a lot to other groups in the space we’re in, and I remember thinking some other names sounded cooler. But it grew on me. The more we stuck with it, the more sense it made,” chtha said.

What seemed to gel the most about fragments is that there is no fixed lineup. Even on super swag music, different members are featured on different tracks. Some are only featured on one song. “But overall we’re one entity,” chtha explained. “So it makes sense that each part is a fragment of fragments.”

Davin sees the group’s potential as limitless. As long as each member continues to pursue music, then “we’re probably going to keep making music together in the future,” he mused. “It could be a fragments thing, or maybe a single that isn’t specifically under fragments, but there will definitely be more music together.”

from top left: kinn, brynne, chtha, and syron

It’s been nearly three months since fragments made super swag music, and recently, they attempted to record a sixth track. There are so many talented artists in the group that it almost felt like a shame not to try for another banger. But production felt stifled, and the music didn’t hit the same.

“I think it’s because there’s already a kind of magic inside the EP that couldn’t really be extended in the same way,” stvphn reasoned. “Creatively, we were so locked into that one moment that the best work came out during that week. Those five songs are the encapsulation of that week.”

There was one song, Davin said, that had potential. But after several attempts with vocals, no one felt the track justified inclusion on the EP.  “As much as we’re having fun, we still want the music to be fire,” Davin said. “We’re not trying to make mid stuff.”

vylarem and ASTA

Perhaps, then, the music was meant to be made this quickly and locked into that one week. For stvphn, that pressure-cooker environment is what produced the best work. “I think a lot of us grew from that because now when I hear the music people are making in our friend group, you can tell the quality that comes out of shorter time spans is really high,” he observed. “It definitely changed the workflow.”

Plus, both stvphn and Davin felt that there was an urgency in following their creative instincts and keeping the production to one week.”You can make something, say ‘I’ll revisit this later’. and then it never has the same feeling again,” stvphn explained.

“That’s why I was so insistent on getting this done in a week. I knew I wasn’t going to have the same motivation later.”

If anything, fragments is proof of what happens when several friends come together to create something weird, fun, and truly of-the-moment. “I think super swag music really captures that time — that last week of December when we had nothing to do and just wanted to have fun making music. Whenever I think about that time, it stands out to me as a really good memory,” stvphn said.

He laughed, knowing that maybe the whole thing sounds absurd. But he didn’t care. “So yeah, it’s swag. It’s fun. That’s really what it is.”