The career, vision, and determination of the four members of Rationalistas (TNT, SXO, Bayman, and DJ Gzas) have always been a great source of inspiration for us!
Since 2009 and the release of their first album,

the Athens-based band has always continued to evolve and challenge themselves as personally than artistically, leading up to the release of “Prosanamma” in 2025, their most accomplished album.

First, music was a means of expression and then it became some kind of psychoanalysis to us.

As years went by, expressing ourselves through music became a necessity, because I personally feel like if I suppressed it from my life, I would be just another 9 to 5 working guy, and years would go by, and life would be futile and nothing would ever happen

I think that this is the reason why we hold on to making music, to express the pain we feel around us, and to be capable of exteriorising what we have inside in a productive way. Thats it. 

C : Yes, so it is a vocation, I mean it’s about making sense of the world. It’s like an existential matter to you. 

TNT : Maybe making music today has become like…how do I put it — something like what believers call faith, something that gives us vision, something we would be lost without. 


SXO : Yes, it’s our core. 

TNT : JI feel like, throughout the years, our commitment to antifascist, antisexist, anticapitalist struggle has become our whole life, and it’s part of our texts and our music.

Even if it remains a necessity to express ourselves about it, we don’t automatically see it as our goal. This things are shared reflexions in our daily lives, they concern until we reach a better society. I mean, the only reason why the Rationalistas could stop talking about antifascist struggles would be that we have reached an ideal society where everyone runs around happily in the prairies.

SXO : We didn’t originally start making music with this exact state of mind : antifascism and antisexism are things we picked up through the years.

We started out, as I said before, because we wanted to talk about everything that was wrong around us, and then we learned to open our eyes and ears to other people’s perspectives, to different life paths, and that’s how we learned to see some things differently.

TNT : It’s mainly about saying goodbye to things that were once useful and that we feel like it’s time to leave behind.

The idea of leaving something behind in order to evolve implies the necessity to accept some kind of suffering, when you chose to get out of your comfort zone.

SXO : Turning your thoughts — sometimes very private, intimate, heavy thoughts — into music is about giving birth to them, uprooting them and giving them like an offering to the public. Symbolically, to me, it’s like igniting them. They are not just mine now, they belong to everyone.

I personally felt this, but I think it might be true for TNT as well — it’s not something that eats me up alone, I give it away, and some people may find an echo, might feel concerned by the same things as I do, and now it’s all burning up and it becomes bigger. And there we are, you and me, and whoever else, we are emptied now, because we have purged it all out of our systems, and we can go on towards something new.

SXO : For the artistic design of the album, we proceeded backwards. We collected the texts like ants in warehouses. When we finally stepped back to look at it all, we saw the incredible amount of things that had been created, and we started wondering how we could name all this. 

It can also be interpreted as a metaphor for political struggle, if we consider the amadou as an individual sacrifice to fuel the fire of the struggle.

SXO : It certainly can be interpreted that way. It’s all the interest we find it the beauty of the short tracks in an album. It’s ambiguous, it’s allegorical, and it can mean so many things at once. Amadou can mean so many things at once.

Gzas : Everyone is free to interpret it as they will, and as they need to. We don’t mean to say just one thing through this title. We address a lot of different things. It’s possible to give a lot of different versions, according to how each person sees things, because we are four very different people. And that’s what’s cool.

In the end, it fits with the way you created the album.

SXO : It actually was a very free way to proceed. I mean that, as a band, we take all the time we need to create, and it’s important regarding the very fast-paced rhythm of the era we live in.

Our approach is very free… We need to make music. And we kind of let ourselves go with the flow. We purge what’s inside of us. And in the end, it becomes something. It was spontaneous, it wasn’t an elaborated concept that we wanted to execute. We didn’t go like : « ok now we’ll create exactly this or that, with this specific aesthetic or this specific title ». 

Gzas : Yes, I agree with TNT because, in order to make a featuring, we would have to spend time with people, to take the time to get together, and unfortunately, we don’t have that time…

TNT : This is why we tend to stay a little out of socialisation sometimes, but it’s also a lot of coincidence. Let’s say that right now, we’re working on a little more featurings.

But since we are very slow on the process, it takes time to get to the recording part. We write thirty songs, than we chose the ones we’ll work on for the final release, and we’d rather do this in person, and take the time to really talk about it and analyse things. So the featurings would have to fit the general idea for the album, and the image of the product we built together.

SXO : We are kind of an introvert band, generally speaking. The political questions also counts, because I think that a lot of rappers are scared to be labelled as political if they choose to work with a political artist. There are probably rappers that aren’t blocked by this, but it’s true that even we have this idea that we can’t be best friends with everyone, you gotta be careful.

Not everyone has the same relationship to music, not everyone wants to put politics into music, when it’s a really important things for us. And I think that this is one of the reasons that brought us to limit the amount of featurings we make.

Gzas : TNT and I partly live out of music, but not as the Rationalistas, more with DJ sets that we do every week.


The band definitely helped us getting known, but to me, playing music in a hall is not the same as performing live with my band, or as writing music at home.


I mean, I see the DJ sets as a regular job that has nothing to do with the music we make as a band, it is one the side.

TNT : Personally, saying that I make a living as a musician wouldn’t suit me as a person. I can see how, it I put my strengths in the right place, meaning doing a lot of concerts regularly, it would be possible to make a living with music in the years to come. But to me, it wouldn’t fit the sense I try to make out of my life so far.

Unless an extreme event happens to me, or to us as a band, as it happened for Lex. It was an extreme event to him : one day he was working in a cafe, and the next day he won so much money that he had enough to quit working for a long period. It’s a very exceptional situation.

Gzas : Yes, and if we start running after money it can cause problems, because once you start to make it financially, you start to get discouraged, to lose your appetite.

If is doesn’t work, you get frustrated, and frustration brings psychological problems and so on, and all this can lead to quitting music when it doesn’t work out well. 

SXO : The truth is, the Greek population is not big, compared to France’s, which is like 6 or  7 times bigger.

In other terms, the amount of concerts that Greece can have is limited and it’s only in big cities.
Making rap in Greece is addressing 8-9 million people, when our genre and our lyrics address a very specific group of people.

Do you feel like you manage to speak to different generations ? How to stay up to date in rap, where the aesthetics and trends evolve so quickly ? 

SXO : I think that people with political concerns have always existed and will always exist, so there will always be people who recognise themselves in what we try to convey.

Regarding music, I think that our band isn’t dogmatic. We like to experiment new things, wether it be old or new trends. I think that there are two tips for something to work :

First, you have to keep your eye open on new releases to see if things fit us musically. If not, it’s okay, there’s no obligation.

The second thing is linked to what I first told you : there will always be rebel minded people. So if you take position and keep a critical mind, there will always be a part of the audience, no matter the age or generation, to feel concerned and aligned with what you have to say.

You’re really focused on the message you address and in the end, it doesn’t really depend on the generation.

SXO:Yes, because the things that oppress us are like the Lernaean Hydra (note from Christina : if you cut one of its heads off, three more sprout it its place), they are still there and will be for the years to come, and so do we, because I feel like as long as people fight agains the system, many more will want to fight, and so on.

TNT : We have been through many different phases since we began as a band.

When we first started, we were addressing a different generation, with a completely different culture and and completely different political way of thinking. Everything was different.

But we can’t hang on to what we know eternally like old dinosaurs and speaking to the young generation using old methods won’t work.