There's a version of the music-brand relationship that everyone knows and nobody really believes in. A shoe company sponsors a stadium tour. A logo appears behind a drumkit. Some algorithm-approved artist is handed a product and a caption. Everyone moves on.

Macbeth Footwear was always going to do something different. Founded in 2002 out of the same world that gave us Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves, the brand was built by people who actually lived inside music — who understood that the real thing happens long before anyone buys a ticket, and long after the cameras go away. The Macbeth Studios Project is the step to relive and restart those passions. 

A lens, not a billboard

The Studios Project isn't a sponsorship programme. It's closer to a documentary series, a creative commission, and a cultural archive all at once. The premise is simple: find artists doing genuinely interesting work, chat, and get out of the way. What comes back is something far more useful than a brand endorsement — it's a real record of where music is right now.

The first instalment centred on dadlore, a four-piece out of San Diego carving a path through the Southern California scene with a sound that doesn't sit still. Shot at Big Fish Recording Studios in Encinitas in a single unbroken take, the film is a portrait of a band in the process of becoming. 

That line from the dadlore interview cuts to the heart of what the Studios Project is really exploring: the ecology of underground music. The friendships, the rehearsal rooms, the college towns that accidentally become scenes, the way community precedes success every single time. These aren't the stories that make it into the mainstream music press. They're the ones that matter most to people who've actually been in bands.

Tokyo, hip-hop, and the long arc of influence

Macbeth Studios doesn't stay in one lane. While the dadlore film is rooted in the present tense — young, alive, still figuring itself out — the Tokyo arm of the project reaches further back, into the cultural sediment of the 1990s, to pull out something equally alive.

Macbeth Studios Tokyo brought together Mayonaize — a Wellington-born graffiti artist and tattooist with a calligraphy-inflected style built over two decades of working across walls, skin, and canvas — with Public Enemy, the New York group whose impact on hip-hop, politics, and visual culture has never really stopped radiating outward. The collection's tagline, Fight the Power, isn't borrowed nostalgia. It's a live wire connecting two very different creative traditions across geography and decades.

Mayonaize's account of his own creative process is unexpectedly precise — and unexpectedly resonant as a philosophy. He describes graffiti and tattooing as operating from the same shared formula: read the surface, find the composition that fits, execute. The canvas changes; the eye doesn't. It's the kind of discipline that looks effortless from the outside and costs decades to develop.

The parallel with what Macbeth Studios is doing isn't accidental. The project is similarly about reading the surface of a cultural moment — not projecting onto it, not selling a version of it — and finding what actually fits. With dadlore, that means a single-take film in a recording studio. With Macbeth Studios Tokyo, it means a collaboration that reaches across the Pacific and thirty years of cultural history. The format follows the subject, not the other way around.

Why this matters for a footwear brand

The cynical reading is that this is content marketing dressed up as culture. The honest reading is that Macbeth has never been a footwear brand that happened to like music — it's a music-adjacent brand that makes footwear. The distinction isn't semantic. It shapes everything from how the Studios Project is produced to why artists actually want to be involved.

Brands that approach music as an audience to be reached make very different work than brands that approach it as a world they already belong to. The Studios Project feels like the latter, because it is. When a dadlore band member talks about camaraderie over ambition, or Mayonaize talks about the satisfaction of a perfect brushstroke, there's no product message being threaded through it. The brands that understand that silence is the most credible thing they can offer are the ones that end up meaning something.

What the Macbeth Studios Project is quietly building — across San Diego, Tokyo, and wherever it goes next — is a body of work. A record of who was making interesting things at a particular moment in music culture, documented properly, and associated with a brand that had the good sense to let the work speak.