Dessa’s first record under her own name was, by her own description, an unofficial one. Doomtree, the Minneapolis crew she reached through spoken word, had a habit taken from rap tradition: every member put out a False Hopes, a cheap solo release of the kind the Minnesota Daily described in February 2005 as made in basements and bedrooms. Hers came out on Doomtree Records on February 28, 2005. It has five songs and runs fifteen minutes. “It was the first music I recorded,” she said in 2012, and she had no distribution at all.
The way in was poetry. She won the first slam she entered, and by the time Doomtree asked her to join, late one night in the house several members shared, she was rapping and singing in a group called Medida. The EP is a crew record in its credits. Lazerbeak produced “Mineshaft” and “Press On”, Tom Servo “Everything Floats”, Paper Tiger “551” and Butcher’s Butcher “Kites”. Cecil Otter guests on “Everything Floats”, Sims on “Press On”, and Jessy Greene plays violin on “Mineshaft”. Andrew Lucas recorded and mastered all five songs at Ronin Audio and mixed the first four. Turbo Nemesis mixed “Kites”.
“Mineshaft” opens with an inventory. Its first line sets the list of things she used to be against the shorter list of things she is. The verse runs through what she has been, ex-lover and ex-friend among them, and calls herself an “underrated writer, overrated rapper” before the hook drops back down: she has been here before, and she knows where it goes. City Pages called the song a tongue-twister. Five years later, A Badly Broken Code included a “Mineshaft II”, with a chorus that turns the old hook on the listener: “You’ve already been here before.”
In “551” the title is a count of days: the year and a half a man kept her sane, give or take an afternoon. Her verse on “Everything Floats” plays with a make-up slogan and goes looking for “a voice in the white noise”. “Kites” closes the EP slower and sung, which City Pages called drowsy and hypnotic. Its refrain puts neon burning a hole in the night next to Freon burning one in the sky, and its verses find room for a pushpin through the sternum and “a long year under glass”.
The local press liked it from the start. The Minnesota Daily called it daring days before it came out. City Pages praised the mix of slam poetry, R&B singing and rapping, and its “often dark look at her life and loves”. It made local year-end lists, the Star Tribune’s among them, and that September Dessa was nominated as best spoken word artist at the Minnesota Music Awards.
From 2026, False Hopes reads as a first sketch of the artist Dessa became. The pull between dense rap and singing, the confessional writing and the Doomtree producers are all here, years before A Badly Broken Code, Chime and the concerts with the Minnesota Orchestra. It is slight by design: five songs, a quarter of an hour, a release she herself called unofficial. The short form suits her, because the writing gets all the space, and the best of it holds up. The first song still opens on the list of everything she used to be, and five years later she wrote it a sequel.
