Rapstar | Pitchfork

New York are masters of anhedonic pop. The drolly named duo—26-year-old Estonian efficiency artist Gretchen Lawrence and 24-year-old Senegalese-American visible artist and mannequin Coumba Samba—ostensibly draw from membership music and hip-hop, however you may’t think about their second album, Rapstar*, giving anybody the power to elevate their toes from the bottom. It’s remarkably dead-eyed music, characterised by Samba’s sardonic deadpan and chilly minimalist glitches that sound just like the Sheffield experimental duo snd as lined by the ladies from Gossip Lady. Probably the most excitable that the 2 musicians sound on Rapstar*—which isn’t very excitable in any respect—is after they splice their voices collectively on the title monitor to ship a terse, twisted evaluation of contemporary life: “The federal government will fuck you/And declare you deserve it.”

The place a lot prototypical “Gen Z music” makes use of maximalism to seize a way of overwhelmed disaffectedness—assume Babyxsosa starting a music by yelling and ending it as if she’s been distracted by her telephone—New York take a unique tack. Rapstar* is each mundane and disorienting, right down to its format: On Bandcamp and streaming companies, it’s been inexplicably break up into two volumes, subtitled Facet A and Facet B, which means that you just’ll should make a playlist of all of the tracks to pay attention in a single go, or in any other case fiddle with Spotify midway by means of, as in case you’re flipping a report. On “bronx,” Samba repeats the phrase “Within the Bronx I stroll” till it takes on the character of Sisyphean battle; on “no bra,” London-based efficiency artist No Bra mutters about “Making out with no costume” over a subliminal, mutant footwork beat and improvised piano, making for an disagreeable however resolute reply to the query, “What does a intercourse jam sound like for a era that reportedly hates intercourse?” It’s regularly irritating music, however in case you’re somebody who’s regularly irritated by the world round you—who, for instance, desires to scream about the truth that there are two Clean Avenue Coffees inside 100 toes of Tottenham Court docket Highway station—it may really feel type of soothing, a illustration of modernity that depicts life as neither distorted and maximalist nor gloomily dystopic, however someplace within the center.

New York’s debut, 2022’s darkly humorous No Sleep Until N.Y., leaned sufficient into electroclash and ’00s signifiers—skinny denims, the aforementioned Gossip Lady lilt of Samba’s voice—that it might broadly be tied right into a broader reappraisal of “indie sleaze” and weblog home, an thought furthered by final yr’s “evening n day,” on which they flipped the hook of Ladytron’s “Seventeen” into one thing even creepier and extra miserable than the unique. Rapstar* nonetheless type of appears like “Sneakers,” significantly on “kicks,” on which Samba recites lyrics about shoe dependancy over an IDM hum, however it additionally feels much less indebted to the previous than earlier New York music.