Groovy Steppin Sh*t, Lisha G and Trini Viv’s new set of prismatic bangers, emerged from a head-scratching linkup. Whereas learning the music enterprise at Drexel College, Trini Viv began fucking with the South Carolina rapper’s sound, paid her to rap on one in every of his beats, and a few emails, weed, and studio classes later, the tape was born.
That origin story displays within the music: There’s a thrillingly out-of-place, out-of-space high quality to Groovy Steppin Sh*t. Right here you’ve bought two completely totally different artists: In a single nook, Lisha G, who says she grew up within the “nation nation” of Camden, South Carolina, the place she first recorded in a barn, and is greatest identified for hazy, red-eyed plugg in dialog with the Atlanta underground. Within the different nook, Trini Viv, a current faculty grad from the Philly suburbs whose zany, Pharrell-meets-Pi’erre-Bourne beats continually bubble and shape-shift just like the Factor. Collectively, their sound is one-of-one—psychedelic shit-talk that sounds extra prefer it was born from alien communication than the nth Yeat album. Lisha’s blunted formalism reels Trini’s watercolor synths into her world, simply as Trini pushes Lisha out of her consolation zone. Like WiFiGawd and Tony Seltzer’s Warmth Verify, or BoofPaxkMooky and GRIMM Doza’s I’ve Been Excessive for Days, and even this 12 months’s J.U.S./Squadda B tape, it’s a kind of completely peculiar marriages of robust underground rapper and nerdy beatmaker that solely comes round occasionally.
As soon as a sneering firebrand within the vein of Rico Nasty, Lisha G has since settled right into a colder, extra nonchalant type extra just like Tony Shhnow or the late Enchanting. It’s all of the extra surgical: She sinks her enamel deeper when she casts off bars like subtweets. The attraction right here isn’t the subject material, which is usually common shit—getting excessive, getting cash, blowing up, guys blowing her cellphone up—a lot as her calm supply and sneaky acrobatics. See how, on “Wanna Wager,” she revs into triplets for 2 bars earlier than sinking again right into a somber, Gucci-type pitter-patter: “The way in which I’m residing… it get tough. It get robust/Ain’t no approach I’m giving up.”
