Underground rap heads both love LAZER DIM 700’s serrated freestyles or say he epitomizes the style’s deterioration into clickbait meme music. The Atlantan was essentially the most abrasive rookie of 2024, toting a mode halfway between zoinked occasion music and air-raid sirens. He spits in an extremes-of-consciousness circulate, cracking songs open with a torrent of expletives earlier than launching into verses which are principally only one lengthy, leapfrogging hook, like he’s making an attempt to speedrun to the two-minute mark. It’s a world of za, zot, fawks, effective shyts, wigging and wigan out, buckshots, buck-downs, and bust-downs. He data every thing on the cellphone app BandLab, so the blending is nonexistent.
However beneath the viral spectacle is only a younger man from the small city of Cordele, Georgia, who idolized Lil Wayne as a child and obtained into making rap within the second grade, when his mom’s boyfriend would arrange makeshift studios of their home. LAZER DIM 700’s complete come-up has been serendipitous: He met his early producer-partner Goxan within the remark part of a YouTube kind beat; he created his first viral hit, “Asian rock,” on PlaqueBoyMax’s Twitch stream Tune Wars, over a random beat he discovered on YouTube. His finest songs catch lightning in a vial, 90-second snippets of comedy and chaos rooted in ephemeral, absurdist moments. They electrify but additionally make you surprise how completely different they could sound if he’d recorded them at one other time, with different arbitrary ideas swirling in his scrambled mind.
KEEPIN IT CLOUDY might soundtrack a haunted hayride the place a distorted dark-plugg 808 impact shadows each scare, the actors are costumed like “Swiss cheese” opps, and weed smoke casts an impenetrable pall. That is LAZER’s debut studio album, which might recommend a stage up: extra time spent, greater manufacturing values. However as an alternative of beating out to new floor, the album largely feels like LAZER on cruise management—and it loses among the janky madness that made his early music so thrilling.
You may blame a few of that dulled spark on the cleaner mixing, which takes away the sooner music’s scrappy, sickly thrill, when the songs felt perpetually on the breaking point. But it surely’s additionally as a result of LAZER’s voice has a sedate, weathered edge, like he recorded the album after working a mile private finest. To cite “KEEPIN IT CLOUDY,” he typically sounds just like the za has despatched him into orbit. Goxan and Skello’s bass spasms prefer it’s talking in vibrational braille on “MILITANT,” virtually swallowing up LAZER’s arrhythmic circulate. “FAST & FURIOUS” smacks like all variety of darkish plugg tunes from the final couple of years; LAZER soft-talks like he’s making an attempt to calm Ark and mahxlxtl’s beat down from a mood tantrum.