Everything bursts alive here, from the surround-sound vocals to the production roster that’s basically the cloud-rage Avengers. Seamless transitions make F1LTHY and Warpstr’s synthetic blazes melt against the icy trembles of Lusi, Woesum, Yung Sherman, and Whitearmor. Bladee’s delivery is constantly morphing, hurling horrorcore grunts and evil ASMR whispers over smooth rap flows and the kind of helium-high singing he honed on Crest and The Fool. Demented ad-libs shadow pristine verses; words deform into mutant growls. “King Nothingg” is a killer coronation: Bass thuds convulse, synths shiver, Bladee jokes about trauma-dumping and murdering people for nothing. The mix shakes with demonic sound effects yet somehow ends in a dreamy cloud rap reverie. It’s a far cry from the limp Auto-Tune droning of his early days.Amid the chaos, Bladee pauses to take stock of things with striking lucidity given his usual tendency to abstract and arrive at ideas from oblique angles. He dropped his first solo tape, Gluee, just about a decade ago, back when he was known as Yung Lean’s sidekick. Now at 30, he’s experiencing something like a mid-career crisis. “I got so old, I got embarrassed to even be here, you know?” the intro goes. He’s aware of his immense influence on a new generation of internet musicians, but also feels more personally fucked up and worse off than he was as a fresh-faced 18-year-old. The gorgeously glum “Flatline” conveys Bladee’s sadness about letting someone down—possibly himself?—with some of his most expressive vocals ever, fluttering between hushed murmurs and frail cries; as he repeats how he’s suffocating in “dark feelings,” his tone mirrors the dismay by slowly dropping in pitch.For as agitated as this album can be, it’s also sweetly silly in classic Bladee fashion. “Lows Partlyy” is eerily joyous, its blooming synths juxtaposing wildly with the depressive lyrics lurking beneath. “Burn down the disco, hang the fucking DJ,” Bladee coos at himself, sounding blissed-out. Some lyrics recall the gibberish aphorisms and cutesy riddles of his 2021 Fool era. He talks about “violently drug abusing weed” and accidentally buying 1,000 Smurfs toys while browsing eBay on shrooms. He scorns people for watching YouTube Shorts and says he paints better than Rembrandt. Lines that might feel dead in print electrify the ear through Bladee’s agile vocals, twitching with odd mouth-noises and tone-switches, like how he randomly chirps “I’m back!” as if he’s returning home from work in the twilight haze of “Flexing & Finessing.”
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