At City High, students are in a variety of music groups. Band, orchestra, and choir are popular classes. But rap music is frequently absent from those groups. To express themselves with their preferred type of music, several students decided to form their own group.

DiverCity is comprised of City High students Liam Nicholson ’19, Patrick Bui ‘19, Douglas Tran ‘19, and Quinton Runge ‘19. Eleven months ago, they released their first song, “Latemix.”

“One night we were listening to music at Liam’s basement and we were like, ‘Let’s hop on a track real quick,’ found a random beat that we found off the internet, wrote down some lyrics, and then recorded it and posted it,” Bui said. “A week later, we got like 7000 views on it, so that’s what made us go further.”

The group thought of their name by comparing their different artistic styles, inspirations, personalities, and ethnicities.

“It started off with Quinton who is African American, Patrick who is Asian, and me, who is white, so we thought Diversity,” Nicholson said. “Then we put the ‘C’ in for Iowa City.”

The group finds inspiration in artists from Travis Scott to Eminem to Kendrick Lamar. As it decides topics to rap about, it meets together to  discuss them as a group.

“We’ll just all sit down at one point and talk about a subject, and start rapping about it,” Bui said.

They also look towards their own lives for ideas, particularly toward things like relationships and breakups.

“I like the venting part, you just let your feelings out into a song,” Tran said. “Just releasing it and having people like it, it’s a plus.”

However, members of the group are taking care to not become too competitive as they continue producing music.

“I just want to keep doing it for the fun aspect. I don’t want to be taking it too seriously, because once it gets too serious it could get competitive,” Runge said. “I don’t foresee us making this a big argument between anybody.”

The group is looking to continue recording singles and its next album, “X,” in the coming months at Nicholson’s house.

“We’re going to release some more albums and keep working together hopefully on future projects, like we’re working on a new album right now, and each of us are working on singles together, “ Nicholson said. “So, it works out pretty well.”