Kool John and P-Lo’s manager told me to meet the rappers for an interview at an East Oakland address on a recent afternoon. While I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, I knew I had made it to my destination when I saw a sticker of a smiley face with shades — the logo of Kool John’s party-centric lifestyle brand, Shmoplife — stuck to a parking sign outside the house.

Rapper Ooty Ooo answered the door and said that Kool John and P-Lo were on their way. Ooty was hanging out in the living room with Skipper, an MC from Kool John and P-Lo’s music collective, HBK Gang. (HBK’s core members also include Iamsu!, Sage the Gemini, and Kehlani — three East Bay artists on the cusp of national fame.) Ooty and Skipper were in a tense discussion about why Bay Area radio stations often ignore up-and-coming local rappers. They compared observations on YouTube plays and Billboard stats, attempting to break down the science of making a hit.

I soon learned that the house is known as the Shmop Compound and serves as Kool John and P-Lo’s unofficial headquarters and party spot. Neon, weed-themed posters lined the walls; empty liquor bottles filled the mantle like trophies; a stripper pole was one of the dining room’s few pieces of furniture.

Ooty called Kool John on FaceTime and handed me the phone. “I’m stuck in traffic. Look,” he said, flipping the camera around to show me the congested freeway. Sporting sunglasses, a snapback, and a goatee, he looked almost exactly like the cartoon version of himself on the poster in the entryway of the house. Branding is one of Kool John’s strong suits: Even though he’s still an underground rapper, he already markets himself as an icon.

By the time Kool John and P-Lo arrived, more friends wearing Shmoplife gear had filtered into the living room and our interview now had an audience. Everyone was eager to hear about the duo’s recent trip to Hawaii, where they performed to promote their self-released, collaborative album, Moovie!, which came out in late July. People passed around blunts and P-Lo shared stories about riding scooters along the beach and shooting a music video in a forest.

“Coming from where we come from, a lot of people don’t really make it that far,” explained Kool John (Jonathan Faulk), who is from Richmond. “Being able to tour outside of your city and make it to different places is a beautiful thing.” P-Lo (Paolo Rodriguez), who grew up in Pinole, nodded in agreement.

The members of HBK Gang often feature each other on their solo projects, and Kool John and P-Lo were already frequent collaborators when they decided to make Moovie! As one of HBK’s most prolific producers, P-Lo made beats for Kool John’s previous mixtapes, and songs with both of their vocals had done particularly well. The popularity of their percussive, high energy party jam “Quit Cattin” — which has almost 600,000 plays on SoundCloud — helped the two artists realize their potential as a duo.

Kool John described the creation of Moovie! as a natural evolution of his previous projects with P-Lo. “I was going to his house a lot, so we already had a bunch of other songs together and some of them were unfinished,” he said. “So we were just like, ‘Let’s complete these songs and give the people what they want.'”

Moovie! opens with the song “Shmoplife HBK Anthem,” which features P-Lo chanting Shmoplife/Heartbreak Gang over a slow-moving bass buildup. While the concept of Shmoplife is attached to almost every project Kool John is involved in, it still remains nebulous to the uninitiated. It’s a clothing brand, a mixtape series, a viral marketing strategy, and a movement all at once. Kool John explained that Shmop — in all of its many forms — hinges on the philosophy of “living every day like it’s Saturday night.” This upbeat attitude and hedonistic ethos imbues Moovie!’s fourteen tracks.

Though its hyper-sexualized lyrics are somewhat two-dimensional, the album seduces listeners into Kool John and P-Lo’s dimly lit, smoke-filled world, which seems to exist somewhere between last call and the after-party. Piggybacking off each other’s lines with wordplay aplenty, the two rappers are cocky and exuberant, and their verses offer no shortage of second-hand ego boosts. While hip-hop and R&B lyricists have shifted in recent years toward vulnerability — with artists such as Future and the Weeknd focusing their recent work on drug-induced emotional numbness — Kool John and P-Lo appear to genuinely enjoy the excessive partying they describe. The album takes place at the peak of a bender, sometime before the inevitable crash.

While, in previous interviews, P-Lo cited the hyphy movement as a major influence on his production, in Moovie!, he solidifies his signature style. On the album, his beats are slow and pared-down, with looming, ominous bass lines that lend the danceable tracks a dark edge. He sparingly deploys bursts of laser-beam synths and warbled vocal samples, and Kool John’s ample use of Auto-Tune complements the steely, mechanized sounds dominating P-Lo’s sonic palette.

The album’s two singles — the slow, simmering twerk anthem “Blue Hunnids” and the up-tempo boast rap “Bitch I Look Good” — enjoyed viral success, inspiring many fan-made dance videos on Instagram and Vine. In lieu of widespread radio play, the songs’ online reach (with SoundCloud plays in the millions) exposed Kool John and P-Lo to a national audience and precipitated their Moovie! Tour in August, which included many sold-out stops on the West Coast. Through the end of November, they’ll be on the road once again for a US tour with Skizzy Mars.

The rappers excitedly recalled their ardent fans at their meet-and-greets, girls twerking on stage, and the highs of performing for packed concert halls. Much like the endless quest for a good time that defines the plot arc of Moovie!, they seem to view their career trajectories as a series of epic experiences, each one more thrilling than the last. “When something is big and you have the time of your life, we call that a movie,” said Kool John. “You can’t say, ‘That was a great time,’ because anything can be a great time. But everything can’t be a movie.”

Treasure Island Music Festival is typically curated to appeal to two different crowds: Saturday spotlights electronic and pop artists, while Sunday consists of mellow indie rock. However, each year, this paradigm feels increasingly outdated.

The year 2015 saw a great deal of fascinating cross-genre collaborations in pop: Miley Cyrus dropped a self-released album with credits from Ariel Pink and Mike Will Made It; Skrillex and Diplo’s production resuscitated Justin Bieber’s career; Usher put out an anti-police brutality anthem with Nas. Yet instead of taking a cue from these boundary-pushing shifts in the music industry, this year’s festival stuck to the same structure of past editions. As a result, it sequestered its best and most progressive artists to the first day and ended with a monotonous series of similar-sounding bands on the second.

To its credit though, Treasure Island featured on Saturday several stand-out musicians who were innovative enough to redeem the festival from its structural shortcomings. FKA Twigs was one such forward-thinking performer. The British singer-songwriter dazzled a rapt audience with her operatic singing and theatrical stage show. Her band consisted of three musicians who struck their sample pads like war drums with grand gestures that matched the singer’s vocal intensity and moody, alchemical beats.

Twigs’ lyrics probe the overlap between pleasure and discomfort and examine the elemental psychology of desire. She conveyed the polarity of her work with tense choreography, including two duets that were simultaneously erotic and adversarial. Her crystalline voice hit precariously high notes as she built upon familiar tracks with expansive, architectural vocal arrangements.

The event also featured savvy collaborations among established artists taking their sounds in new directions. Big Grams, which followed Twigs’ set, is the joint project of Big Boi from OutKast and electronic pop duo Phantogram. As fans of OutKast know well, Big Boi’s boisterous flow works well over upbeat song structures that lend his rap style a pop sensibility. While Phantograms’ saccharine, synth-driven production achieves this effect, I couldn’t help but think that Sarah Barthel’s singing felt superfluous and that the performance would have been better with Big Boi’s vocals alone. Eventually, however, the trio found its groove, and it was refreshing to see Big Boi work with a younger, lesser-known band instead of rehashing old hits.

Run the Jewels, which is composed of veteran rappers El-P and Killer Mike, briefly joined Big Grams on stage for a high-energy duet. As Run the Jewels, El-P and Killer Mike have adopted a more electronic sound and garnered a younger fan base. Their set, which took place earlier in the day, invigorated the crowd with fast, wobbly, UK grime-influenced beats that complemented the two rappers’ rapid-fire spitting. However, El-P often failed to enunciate clearly and much of his lyrics were lost in favor of the showy technique. Killer Mike, with his booming baritone, carried the set with his superior vocal skills and stage presence.

Up-and-coming singer Shamir also delivered one of the day’s most inspired performances. His soulful, androgynous voice soared over spunky, percussive rhythms with disco and Afrobeat influences. Sitting still during his show was impossible.

While Saturday’s lineup featured diverse artists — not only in terms of sound, but race and gender — Sunday’s lacked variety. The majority of the bands featured exclusively white, male musicians, which attracted an audience of a similar demographic makeup. As one of the Bay Area’s largest music festivals, it was a shame that Treasure Island didn’t do more to appeal to a broader cross-section of the population.

Sunday’s bands’ aesthetics weren’t too different from one another either, with Lower Dens, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs’ sets blending into a haze of palatable indie rock. Drive Like Jehu, a 1990s post-hardcore band, was the only group that jolted the audience awake with its feisty shredding. Meanwhile, other performers failed to elicit an enthusiastic response. The bandleaders of Deerhunter and Chvrches wondered aloud why the large audience was so quiet, although Chvrches eventually got people moving with its new wave-influenced synth pop. The National ended the night with a forgettable performance that would have made fitting background music at Whole Foods or Starbucks.