The defining second for Phiik and Lungs up to now stays a grainy video of the duo standing earlier than racks of t-shirts in a Hoboken classic retailer, rapping like their lives rely upon it. As a droning loop unfurls and a raspy voice croaks, “What the fuck is nice,” 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 move 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 simple. They each grew up on Lengthy Island and have been associates 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, recent and quick 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 may, however largely, as Phiik put it on the Reel Notes podcast, to “bang ‘em over the top.”
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 inside rhymes and intricately organized syllables, certainly the product of round the clock recording classes and bottomless luggage of weed. However the rappers have extra totally developed the contours of their voices, including shading and depth to what may 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 apply, fascinated by the mechanics and malleability of language (in that very same Reel Notes interview, Phiik remembers seeing a rubbish bag filled with Lungs’s rhyme books, every web page stuffed 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 mushy lilt, giving his rambly, punctuation-free traces a bit extra space. Phiik’s move is lithe, typically swish, bouncing between drums like protons searching for a detrimental cost. He’ll fixate on a selected sound and observe it from all angles, like on “Day by day Operation:” “Sunrises with solely psilocybin and easy silence/I’m breaking the science behind waking up a sleeping large.”
