Phiik / Lungs: Carrot Season Album Evaluation

The defining second for Phiik and Lungs thus far stays a grainy video of the duo standing earlier than racks of t-shirts in a Hoboken classic retailer, rapping like their lives depend upon it. As a droning loop unfurls and a raspy voice croaks, “What the fuck is sweet,” two boyish-looking white guys emerge, black hoodies cinched round their faces. Lungs, whose blond brows and eyelashes intensify his unblinking gaze, raps like a wartime Morse code transmission, warning of an impending nervousness assault. His skinny body is nearly alien; he jabs a bony index finger at every syllable to make sure the doomsday message sinks in. Behind him, Phiik bobs like a sidelined AND1 hooper, sometimes mouthing alongside. When he’s up, he darts to the mic, instantly unwinding a percussive circulate that ripples and sputters like raindrops on a drumhead. “Life is something however a dream,” he spits, “and I’m foaming on the mouth.”

The video, which was filmed for Prime Shelf Premium’s Off Prime freestyle sequence, captures the sheer depth of Phiik and Lungs as a duo. Their chemistry comes straightforward. They each grew up on Lengthy Island and have been mates since highschool, sharing an admiration of early Def Jux and Wu-Tang data. In 2014, Lungs joined Tase Grip, the New York Metropolis collective based by AKAI SOLO. Phiik shortly adopted swimsuit. Theirs is a tape-saturated, dusty-but-digital sound, contemporary and instant however strikingly outdoors of time. The 4 entries within the pair’s One other Planet sequence, all produced by Lungs himself underneath the moniker LoneSword, are filled with frantic, imagistic rapping over distressed samples and the occasional brittle drum loop. On One other Planet 4, the 2 pushed their eccentric flows additional than earlier than, partly to see if they might, however principally, as Phiik put it on the Reel Notes podcast, to “bang ‘em over the pinnacle.”

Houston producer Olasegun helms the boards on their new album Carrot Season, offering sunlit, loungey beats filled with vibraphones, chorused guitars, and crisp Pete Rock snares. It’s nonetheless extremely insular music, a mesmerizing deluge of inner rhymes and intricately organized syllables, absolutely the product of round the clock recording periods and bottomless luggage of weed. However the rappers have extra totally developed the contours of their voices, including shading and depth to what might in any other case come off as exhaustingly mechanical.

A lot of the document’s buoyancy comes from Phiik and Lungs’s palpable love for the craft. It’s clear they’re each dedicated to rap as a follow, fascinated by the mechanics and malleability of language (in that very same Reel Notes interview, Phiik recollects seeing a rubbish bag filled with Lungs’s rhyme books, every web page crammed to the margins). Lungs nonetheless raps like a ticker tape printout however finds the areas of give in his once-rigid cadence. On songs like “Who // Eagle Eye” and “Kurt McBurt,” he thaws his creaking monotone with a gentle lilt, giving his rambly, punctuation-free traces a bit more room. Phiik’s circulate is lithe, usually sleek, bouncing between drums like protons in search of a damaging cost. He’ll fixate on a specific sound and observe it from all angles, like on “Each day Operation:” “Sunrises with solely psilocybin and easy silence/I’m breaking the science behind waking up a sleeping big.”