wonderful

The gift of skaiwater’s best music is its unique shape, blown-out underground rap styles carefully folded into delicate origami. Forget every preconceived notion you might have about “rage rap” and put on “rain”—it’s so pretty, a butterfly fluttering around a bomb site. On that album, #gigi, skai harnessed beat drops like wrecking balls crashing into the walls of their heart. You felt every lovelorn Auto-Tune squiggle even as the bass shook your skull. There were countless moments of sudden retreat and explosive payoff, like the eerie calm before a tsunami. Genre experiments were a vessel for cascading feelings. And last year’s pinkPrint mixtapes pushed the envelope even further. Where else will you find a Nottingham rapper chipmunking a Mk.gee sample like prime Just Blaze?

At their most inventive, skaiwater is like if Rodeo-era Travis Scott and Playboi Carti had a baby. That’s why their new album, wonderful, leaves me a little cold. It rarely aspires for that inquisitive, Ye-brained alchemy, the kind that could only come from a forum kid with a bottomless appetite for music across the spectrum. There’s a lack of curiosity—and fun, really—on this record. Instead, skaiwater leans into rote rage rap tropes, verging on Carti parody. Most of these songs are fried, one-note, and tailored for Rolling Loud; either you’re in or you’re out.

Me personally? I’m out. When I listen to songs like “STAR” and “IPHONE 5” off wonderful, my mind goes to the meticulous patchwork of vocal takes and ad-libs on REST IN BASS, Che’s redlining homage to Carti. On a formal level, it’s cool to hear skai weave together their clipped vocals so carefully—it’s like the rap version of watching a surgical combo in Competitive Smash. On a songwriting level, it doesn’t go anywhere. Skaiwater doesn’t have their signature arranger’s touch here; they sound like a copy of a copy.

I don’t know how many more boilerplate bass barrages I need to hear like “NITTY,” which basically cribs the melody of OsamaSon’s “Made Sum Plans,” and “VIRGO,” which is the gross kind of horny (“Her pussy taste like fent”). And on the blaring “DOG,” they enlist their new friend, Atlanta rapper Tezzus, whose verses so far have been like peak Russell Westbrook—either you’re getting a classic performance or a brick. This one is preposterously bad: “When we fuck, we havin’ sex!”

The urgency to turn everything up feels forced. It’s like someone (my money’s on Plaqueboymax) told skaiwater, “Make some shit for the moshpits!” It infects the small details, even skai’s new ad lib: this horrid squawk somewhere between BabyTron and Annoying Orange. I’m tired of how many people in this corner of Zoomer rap are trying to do different versions of the same thing, which is, quite simply, more. Getting louder, getting noisier, asking us to “train our ears.” Have you heard Dragnutz rapping over hardstyle, or Percatric rapping over a dog whistle?

I mean I get it. The coolest music can be the busiest and brashest. When you’re young and your ears are malleable, you wanna hear Black Midi math rock madness or DOMi and JD BECK fitting as many notes as possible into a measure or 2Slimey echoing like a poltergeist over a beat that feels like the Giga-zombie running at you in 28 Years Later. This is music that halts the scroll and actively demands your attention.

But skaiwater’s most interesting music was never loud for loudness’ sake. She learned through listening to dubstep as a kid how songs can be these huge, complex latticeworks for conveying every shade of your psyche, climaxing in moments of dramatic bliss. Their wonky New Orleans bounce ideas, their mellow Jersey club hits, hell, even the gleeful beatjacking across their mixtapes, are all so thrilling and open to possibility compared to the practically conservative rage rap on wonderful.

A better version of this record would’ve followed the instincts of its lower-stakes moments, like the clubby “blink twice,” produced by North West (yes, you read that right) and “SKINS,” which revolves around the most important moment for seemingly every rapper in skaiwater’s scene right now: getting a call from YSL. This record’s shortcomings are especially frustrating because skaiwater is still clearly on some other shit. She’ll sometimes effortlessly bend a note just so, like she wants to make songs that’ll be heard at karaoke bars forever, and she can be charming and funny, too. I love the moment on “MARILYN” where she wags a finger at swag era nostalgics: “If you rock an iPhone 5 turn your shit off!”

I still can’t get the image out of my head: During her set at a co-billed Pitchfork/Them show last summer at Knockdown Center, skaiwater enlisted a painter to go to town on a model’s bare back live on stage as she performed. She is in the lineage of hip-hop’s true originals, artists who built palaces of sound, created their own waves, and never folded to the trends. Her potential to reimagine rap in her own image is too high to excuse these lapses into dreck.