Listening to LAZER DIM 700 in album format feels a bit like stopping a comic throughout his set and asking him to elucidate why his jokes are humorous. Because the 23-year-old Atlanta rapper fine-tuned his Roadrunner-on-lean fashion a couple of 12 months and a half in the past, his work has come out in a relentless stream of abbreviated songs, that are buoyed within the algorithm by his outlandish comedian persona and fixed on-line presence. To interrupt this output into discrete models appears at greatest irrelevant and at worst antithetical to the bigger, brain-scrambling mission.
When listening to Lazer, I typically consider his declare that when he began rapping, he would accomplish that whereas holding a mobile phone in every hand: one to play the beat, the opposite to file that beat and his rapping. This evokes the DIY resourcefulness that has at all times been core to hip-hop, positive. Nevertheless it’s additionally one thing extra distinctly trendy, and greater than a little bit unsettling—the thought of the human as a conduit between completely different modems, his ideas knowledgeable and metabolized by the web in an ideal loop.
Sins Aloud, Lazer’s second album—although the excellence between it and the previous mixtapes is, once more, arbitrary—opens oddly for him, with prodbydrg’s velvet-soft “Really feel Like 2016.” That is the type of file that might be a welcome change of tempo for those who stumbled onto it after an hour of being bludgeoned by Lazer’s common, white-hot fare. However its sequencing right here jogged my memory of how, a decade in the past, Younger Thug opened Barter 6 with “Continually Hating.” This was one other ascendant, idiosyncratic Atlanta rapper who, within the regular rhythm of rap careers, was anticipated to make his Huge Assertion Album; in each instances, the star-in-waiting wrongfoots the listener, and in doing so reveals management over the temper, the stakes, his profession.
Whereas Lazer has cultivated the air of an irreverent scamp who may care much less about that type of lineage, it’s instructive to do not forget that earlier than the top of 2023, his music match way more squarely into Atlanta traditions. As late as that 12 months’s scorching streak, his tasks have been primarily updates on Brick Squad tapes from the late 2000s and early 2010s. His vocals have been already unmixed, evidently hasty BandLab recordings, however his supply was slower and voice deeper, his style in beats inflected with modern plugg however nonetheless defaulting to gothic, post-Lex Luger maximalism. That sensibility finds its method onto Sins Aloud: “Really feel Like 2016” offers technique to Smokkestaxkk and Simani’s “Sins,” the place instrumentation that would have match on a kind of pre-prison Gucci mixtapes is undergirded by drum programming that would solely come within the lengthy, many-times-mutated wake of drill.
