Few young rappers have the ability to convincingly say what they mean and mean what they say. Such talent is traditionally reserved for more seasoned lyricists. While most neophytes struggle through early periods of brand name-checking and aimless braggadocio, Quinton Barnes, the Montreal-based rapper, producer, and relative newcomer, stands as an exception, an artist whose words possess the weight of a more philosophical mind.
Barnes, 27, has managed to establish this voice within only a handful of home-made recordings, quickly solidifying a confident identity in the Canadian city’s DIY experimental music scenes. His latest release, CODE NOIR, adroitly incorporates elements of pre-millennium-era electronic dance music, R&B, and candy-coated pop. This is an artist poised at the precipice of any number and combination of these possible aesthetic directions. There is nothing he has attempted to date that he cannot do.
Barnes’s low-end maximalist 2022 album, For the Love of Drugs, was immersed in a smoky, chopped-and-screwed haze, whereas HAVE MERCY ON ME, his 2024 release, was a more clear-eyed, Gospel-infused affair. Now, CODE NOIR signals another directional swivel toward Saturday night/Sunday morning rave vibes filtered through the classic Warp Records catalogue. Barnes’s brand of hip-hop is less DJ Screw and Death Grips and more Aphex Twin and Autechre – albeit in the era of Amazon delivery drones, Artificial Intelligence, and post-Frank Ocean sexual ambiguity.
Barnes shares sensibilities not only with other rappers and music producers like Ocean, but also with some of the twentieth century’s most poignant Black orators – comedians like Richard Pryor, who demonstrated the courage to talk openly about Blackness and queerness to an implicitly white audience that might have viewed both as exotic at best, or more perilously, potentially threatening. Barnes’s posture is nonetheless fearless, a confidence that one achieves only when there is nothing or everything to lose. CODE NOIR assuredly wagers Barnes’s entire corpus – physically and creatively – in a win-win venture that pays off for artist and audience alike.
The American filmmaker Howard Hawks believed that a good movie comprised three good scenes and zero bad ones. Similarly, CODE NOIR contains several notable hits and no obvious misses. ‘Go With Me’ is a properly radio-friendly single featuring half-spoken, half-sung vocal refrains lamenting the persistent unavailability of an apparent lover. ‘Party Girl’ weaves fine gossamer breakbeats that switch gear mid-track into an anthemic four-to-the-floor rhythm, imploring listeners, as Barnes intones, up onto “that damn floor”. “World keeps turning / world keeps burning,” a seemingly simple couplet, rings with renewed resonance at this pivotal moment. On CODE NOIR, there is no misunderstanding about who Barnes is, and what this music is for.
