I keep coming back to the last ten seconds of ‘ON FLEEK’, a cut from the 18-year-old Atlanta artist Che’s REST IN BASS. Under a staggered 8-bit mosh, the beat is cut up with what sounds like gravel blowing its nose.
Che follows in the rage footsteps of fellow ATLien Playboi Carti in a chase for ever-escalating levels of extremity. He’s a self professed rockstar, a live wire hedonist, and on ‘DIE YOUNG’ he even prophesises: “I’ma die young, we ain’t ever growin’ up.” The music’s body is all raucous punk energy, but its head is off disassociating. Take closer ‘BA$$’, built around a Beach House sample that is then buried under stacks of charred compression. For the digital native, blissed out is a destination you need a whole lotta decibels to get to. Billowing layers of texture alone just don’t cut it.
Che’s is a sound that would rattle old heads still wedded to the 90s, but he pays them no mind. The rapper does give a nod of respect to more recent forebearers, though. Lil B gets a shoutout on opener ‘SLAM PUNK’, as does Future, the Atlanta elder statesman of psychedelic autotune. “I just fucked this bitch in some Gucci flip flops,” a claim hard to take at face value when uttered from what appears to be the zig-zagging electric gremlin from Gremlins 2: A New Batch. It’s all impish compulsion. He plays manic games of ad-lib ping pong, a far cry from Future’s lean hiccup come synthetic sob – in that context the Gucci line sounded less like a brag and more like a brief moment of intoxicated clarity, perhaps a heart on sleeve confession.
‘HELLRAISER’ features the kindred spirit OsamaSon, whose album Jump Out from earlier this year was another essential slice of hyper-online rap. The pair “raise hell on earth”, compounding chipmunk vocals stretched out with digitally enhanced elasticity. Meanwhile, on ‘HOOD FAMOUS’, he squawks, “I feel it in my chest I’m the best,” all the vaulted ego of your best rap or rockstar. You get a sense of vertigo. A sense too that in that moment he might be right.
Che and other young artists are pushing harder and harder in this rage subset of trap, with a magpie-like hunt for glistening vibes in genres elsewhere – like the frazzled synths of Crystal Castles (the rapper has a tattoo of the artwork from the duo’s debut EP on his ribcage), but placed in thrillingly overstimulated new contexts. REST IN BASS is yet another upper threshold. You feel an implicit promise with this music will at some point break through somewhere else. I can’t wait to see where things go from here.
