Double Cup was a game-changer. It was footwork like the world had never heard it before: an album in the truest sense, in a genre that had often felt too ephemeral for the format. It was footwork you could wash dishes to, footwork you could make-out to, footwork that could charm the most conservative of ears. It thrashed and bucked: I don’t give a fuck about you, I don’t give a fuck about myself, a Juice sample spat on “I Don’t Give a Fuck”, hi-hats spraying like gunfire. It swooned: On “Let U No”, a breathless Floetry sample felt lightheaded and swirling like a drunken first kiss. Mostly, it soared.

The album cover was no coincidence: a jet’s-eye view of Chicago’s golden-orange, sodium vapor–lit grid—the broken city blurring together, for the moment, into a glowing, triumphant composite. And though this music was unmistakably Chicago, it invited the world to join, with a generousness the city rarely shows its own people. To hear the flushed, syrupy Rhodes stabs of “Feelin” blasting out of sweaty Brooklyn warehouses was its own triumph: snobby East Coast hipsters losing their collective shit to the sounds of a black Midwestern avant-garde that had long gone uncelebrated but kept going anyway. It was a win for a city in serious need of a win, and for a dude who more than deserved it.

Two-thousand fourteen was going to be Teklife’s year—not just for its primary ambassadors Rashad and Spinn, but for the entire crew. They destroyed SXSW, playing more than 20 shows. “We were just toasting to success,” says Tre. “We had a ball, and I knew everything was going to be huge from that point forward. I would just think of the days when we would be in Spinn’s house for hours, up all night just making tracks—all that work is starting to pay off.”

Earl and Taye were both in the midst of prolific streaks, establishing themselves as promising voices of Teklife’s second generation. Spinn and Manny went back out to the West Coast. Rashad was bouncing around, touring Japan in January, coming home for a day or two, heading off to South America. Still, he was in constant contact with the rest of the crew. Tre remembers Rashad Skyping him for hours from Brazil, talking about how they were finally in the positions for their sons to be set. “When he got back, he was super tired, you could just hear it in his voice,” says Spinn. “I was like, Bro, I think you should get some sleep, and he was like, Nah man, I’m good, I got shit to do. We had a little bit of time before we went on tour together, and I ain’t think nothing of anything, it was all good.”

Rashad couldn’t get into Canada, so Spinn went on ahead. They planned to meet in Detroit for the next day’s show. Spinn didn’t know Rashad was heading back to Chicago first; their last conversation was about customs. The next day Spinn took a train from Toronto to Detroit, anticipating that he’d meet Rashad there; his phone didn’t work in Canada. Boylan, another Teklife member and a science teacher at Rashad and Spinn’s old high school, finally got through. Spinn knew it was going to be about Rashad. “He got on FaceTime and told me what he thought was going on, and I’m on the train trying not to freak out and cuss him out. What are you telling me, bro? Where is Rashad right now? You telling me what you think is going on, but until I know somebody seen him and can tell me this is what this is…”

Earl was at home, having woken up with a strange feeling. Then he got the call. “I couldn’t even think straight,” he remembers. “I called Spinn, and he was in transit to go meet Taye. And then Taye called me like, Bro, please don’t tell me this is real. And that was one of the most painful moments of my life.”

In Detroit, the promoters were planning to cancel the show, but Spinn declined. He didn’t want to sit in his hotel room in silence, he wanted to play some fucking tracks. “Looking at Taye in his eyes, the young dude, how he was looking—I know he needed this too,” he says. “I couldn’t fucking digest it at the time. Because I didn’t get to see him. And I never got to see him again.” Rashad’s family opted not to have a funeral.

That night went… well, it’s hard to say. Taye’s voice shrinks to barely a whisper revisiting it. They got through the show. If the crowd hadn’t known about Rashad when they got there, they knew when they left. DJ Godfather picked them up afterward and they talked for a while. “It was a lot of love in Detroit,” Spinn recalls. “Everybody was feeling this shit. And through the somberness of it all, I was smiling on the inside a little bit.” But everything had changed.