Screenshot/NPR
Audio By Carbonatix
In case you missed it, Dallas hip-hop group Cure for Paranoia won this year’s NPR Tiny Desk concert, rising to the top of nearly 6,000 submissions from across the nation.
For the big show, the 11-piece band, which often performs as a collective with various rotating members, rocked matching jumpsuits painted with red, yellow and purple eyes and adorned with patches from Spinster Records in Bishop Arts. The backs of their jumpsuits appear to feature The Eye at the Joule, a nod to the downtown site of their contest-winning submission.
The band is led by frontman Cameron McCloud, who started the project as a therapeutic outlet for dealing with mental illness. “Y’all, please take your meds, though,” he told the Tiny Desk audience.
The three-song set began with “The Artshow,” off one of our favorite Dallas releases of last year, “Work of A.R.T.” Before launching into the song that won them the contest — the genre-defying “No Brainer” — McCloud took a moment to introduce each band member, and to set some ground rules for the true Cure for Paranoia live show experience.
“The whole point of a Cure for Paranoia show is to understand that ain’t nobody thinking about you like you thinking about you… ” That’s rule number one,” McCloud said as he encouraged the audience to dance and jump around if they felt compelled to do so.
It’s impossible not to feel a sense of immense pride while watching the set, but a particularly moving moment arrives about halfway through the performance when McCloud recalls that while he was in the middle of his daily verse challenge last year, his mother suffered a heart attack. He said that while at the hospital with her, she was still checking to make sure he had completed his daily verses. She died shortly after.
“I had every reason to quit, and I had every reason not to continue, but I knew that would make my mom so sad if that was the reason why,” McCloud tells the crowd. “If a little black boy with mental illness in the middle of a dead mom arc can commit to himself for a full year, there’s no reason that everybody in this room can’t do whatever it is that they set their mind to times 10.”
The final song of the performance was also a testament to that commitment.
“Speaking of persevering, we lost three times,” McCloud said. The group then closed out with a full-circle moment as they went into “Unbothered/That Kid Cam,” their two-part submission from the 2023 iteration of the contest, filmed at Fort Worth’s Niles City Sound recording studios.
“I ain’t cryin’ on the camera, so let’s wrap it up,” McCloud said in the final seconds of the performance, as if we ourselves weren’t already watching with tear-blurred vision.
Watch the full performance below.
Cure for Paranoia will embark on the 10-date 2026 Tiny Desk Contest Tour starting June 10.
