Get to Know: Johnny Venus

Photo Credit: Rafael Avcioglu

“There’s a time for everything.”

Johnny Venus says this while talking about the impermanence of love, the people who enter our

lives, and the strange process of learning when to hold on and when to let go. But the sentiment

extends far beyond the relationship he is describing. It feels equally at home within THE 11TH

HOUR, an album that moves through its own succession of emotional states, each song

occupying its own moment, memory, or feeling. “11:00” begins with the voices of the people who

raised him; “Porsche 9/11” arrives somewhere entirely different; “Sarahtonin” lingers in the

chemistry of a relationship; “Nightmares” sits with the anxiety of not knowing what comes next;

and “Can You Pray For Me?” brings everything back to reflection.

It is also an apt place to meet Johnny now. After years of making music, growing alongside

EarthGang, and allowing life to change what he wants to say, he has reached a point where he

can no longer make music from the perspective of the person he was when he started. “I can't

give people an 18-year-old version of me anymore,” he tells me, explaining that he has to be

honest about where his life is now. There is no resentment in the admission, only an

understanding that growth asks something different of you.

What is happening right now is THE 11TH HOUR: a record Johnny wants you to experience in

full, without interruption, without excess, and without the pressure to arrive at one particular

feeling. Of the roughly twenty songs they had to choose from, the ones that remained were the

ones that felt “lush and full”, the ones that carried a “complete thought”. “I never wanted a lot of

songs,” he says. “We don't have time for that.” His vision was simple: “Run the shower, press

play.” By the time the record ends, he imagines you’ll have finished your makeup, poured your

drinks, and be ready for whatever comes next.

It is funny, then, that when I listened to the album, I heard something closer to the mood of the

hours before sleep—heartbroken, contemplative, and slightly lost in your own thoughts, but

Johnny understands that too. He thinks about Sunday mornings, vinyl records playing from

beginning to end while the rest of the day waits outside. For him, the point is that the songs

should be purposeful enough to survive all of those settings. “I want these to be purposeful,” he

says. “I don't want any fluff, no fillers, nothing to put on there, just because.”

That instinct towards intention follows Johnny beyond the music. Before he was thinking about

tracklists and album worlds, he was studying architecture and design at Hampton, developing

an interest in the visual arts that music eventually left little room for. THE 11TH HOUR gives him

an opportunity to return to that part of himself. Through House of Venus, he is beginning to

curate not only how the music sounds, but how it looks, feels, and exists around people. “This is

my space, House of Venus, where I can create something,” he says. What begins digitally, he

hopes, will grow into something rooted in Atlanta before expanding beyond it.

Atlanta has always been part of that language. Johnny talks about the city as an artistic

ecosystem rather than simply a hometown, one capable of producing generations of artists

whose sounds remain connected even as they evolve. He can move from TLC to Ciara to Usher to The-Dream and still hear the thread tying them together, particularly in the relationship

between Atlanta's R&B and hip-hop. He is drawn, too, to the artists he calls “underground”,

although his definition has little to do with obscurity. “Underground for me just means that they're

just so connected to the people,” he explains. “They really are leading the trends and the pulse.”

That pulse is something Johnny wants to carry into his own music. He speaks about blending

the trap sounds he grew up around with the analogue textures and musicianship that have

become part of his creative world, bringing them into a digital landscape and seeing what

happens when the two meet. It is the same instinct that has followed him since he began

making music at around 18, when he would take sounds he already loved and ask himself how

he could make them his own. Michael Jackson samples, trap-inspired beats, the music his

friends were making, all of it became material. Then college widened the palette again,

introducing him to rock, alternative music, and artists like Kid Cudi, who made the possibilities

feel less fixed. As life became more complicated, the music changed with it. “You're not 15

anymore,” he says. “You got responsibilities, and other people's responsibilities start to affect

yours.” Eventually, the songs became a diary.

A diary, by definition, changes with the person writing it.

For Johnny, one of the biggest changes has been learning what it means to make music outside

of EarthGang. There is no dramatic rupture in the way he describes it, no single moment where

he woke up and decided he wanted to leave everything behind. He had always been “group

first”, even when opportunities existed to put his own name at the front. The shift was gradual,

arriving alongside changes in his life and the things he found himself wanting to talk about. “I

have to be honest with what's going on in my life,” he says. “My life is changing, and the things

that I talk about are changing, right? And that's okay.”

The comparison he makes is not to a breakup, but to siblings. Two people can grow up together,

share the same rooms, and know each other for most of their lives, only to find themselves one

day living in completely different places. “We shared the same bed,” he says, “and we live in two

different lives.” There is tenderness in the analogy because Johnny is not interested in assigning

blame to the distance. “I'm just growing,” he says. “It's cool. Let everybody else make what they

want to make of it. We'll see what the future holds.”

Photo Credit: Rafael Avcioglu

If anything, the years he spent within EarthGang have given him more to draw from now. The

relationships he formed through the group, Spillage Village, and the wider community around

them remain part of his creative life. He can bring this new project to people he has known for

years and tell them what it means to him, and their response is rooted in something deeper than

simply liking a song. “I'm with that because I fuck with you as a person,” he says. The past has

not disappeared. It has become part of what allows the present to exist.

That same understanding of time appears in the album's more intimate moments. When I ask

Johnny who Sarah is, he laughs because, of all the questions I could ask, that is apparently the

one he expected to be the tea. She is a woman with whom he shared a chemistry that he says

is difficult to explain—the kind of connection that loses something when you try too hard to make

sense of it. “You don't want to have to make sense of it,” he tells me. “You just enjoy it for the gift

that it is.” He knows that it will not last forever, and rather than treating that impermanence as a reason to hold back, he sees it as an invitation to be present. “I know it's not gonna be here

forever, so let me enjoy this fully and completely right now.”

It is that same tension that lives inside “Nightmares”. The song is less about the certainty of an

ending than the anxiety of not knowing what will happen next. Johnny describes the fear that

comes with meeting someone who brings out a new side of you, then wondering what happens

to that side of yourself if the person is no longer there. When you are younger, he says, it is

easy to give another person that kind of power. Getting older teaches you to take it back. “The

older you get, the more you start looking for opportunities to bring light to all the sides of you,”

he says. “You don't give that power to someone else.”

Once you take that power back, he explains, love becomes less about trying to hold something

still and more about being grateful that it happened at all. “I'm gonna enjoy this while it lasts,

while it's here,” he says. “Everything is a time for everything.” It is one of the simplest ideas on

the album, and perhaps one of its most important: nothing has to last forever to have mattered.

That philosophy extends to the way Johnny thinks about the music itself. When I ask which

songs he needs listeners to experience exactly as he did in the studio, he refuses to choose.

Every song, he says, already has someone who has claimed it. “This is my shit,” somebody will

tell him, and that is enough. “That's all I need.” He does not need one universal favourite. If

someone finds their song, they will share it, play it for somebody else, put it on in a hot tub, and

eventually find their way into the rest of the record.

His own favourites shift too. On the day we speak, “On and On”, “Porsche 9/11” and “Runway

Killer” are the songs he keeps returning to. “On and On” is particularly meaningful because it

was the first song he made for the project, with a verse he wrote back in 2022 that somehow still

feels like it belongs to the present. “That's when you know that you struck a chord,” he says.

“You can hear something from a long time ago or something from yesterday, and it's like, damn,

this person is speaking to me right now.”

“Porsche 9/11” gives him something else entirely: movement. He wanted to make something

sweet and fun, something that could make people dance and sing. “I just want fun,” he says.

And that desire matters because THE 11TH HOUR never stays in one emotional register for too

long. It can be reflective and playful, romantic and anxious, nostalgic and completely present.

Johnny is not trying to resolve those contradictions. He is allowing them to exist beside each

other, because that is what life has taught him to do.

Even the album's opening and closing understand that.

Johnny wanted the first voices we hear to belong to the people who shaped him. His mother

sings, and women from the church appear; together, their voices evoke those who raised him

and the love he grew up around. “I want y'all to be the first voices that people hear,” he says,

because “these are the first voices that I heard coming out.”

Then, after all the movement of the record, comes “Can You Pray For Me?” Johnny describes it

as a culmination, a moment where he can look back at the scenes that have played out across

the album — “American Dream”, “Sarahtonin”, “Porsche 9/11”, “Feng Shui” and try to understand what they have meant together. It is not an ending so much as a pause before whatever comes next.

That feels fitting for an artist who is still learning how to stand inside the present without needing

to erase the past.

Photo Credit: Rafael Avcioglu

Even working with The-Dream became part of that process. Johnny admits that, at first, he was

protective. This was his first solo project, and he needed to know that anyone involved

understood what he was trying to make before they could help him make it better. But after they

spent time together, including a period working in Las Vegas, away from their families, something shifted. “He gets it,” Johnny says. What he appreciated most wasThe-Dream's ability to remain hands-off, to challenge an idea without taking it away from theperson who made it. Johnny compares him to “a cool professor”: someone who can walk into the room, ask why you made a decision, suggest another possibility, and then let you figure out what you want to do with it.

It is an approach that feels remarkably aligned with where Johnny is now. He is not interested in

proving that he can be somebody else. He is interested in discovering how much of himself he

has not yet shown.

“I don't feel like I have to prove anything,” he tells me. “I think learning is really sweet.” The solo project gives him the opportunity to see how other artists build their worlds and to understand

rollouts and the details involved in being responsible for the entire picture. More importantly, it

gives him space. Space to tell his story. Space to grow. Space to let the music say something

that could not have been said before.

This is what makes THE 11TH HOUR feel so alive: it is not a record about arriving. It is a record

made by someone who has become comfortable being in motion and understands that every

version of yourself has its own moment and that outgrowing one does not mean you have to

reject it.

Johnny has spent years honing his sound, giving time where time is deserved, and allowing

himself to grow into the artist he is now. At THE 11TH HOUR, it is time to let the music speak for itself.