Always late but right on time, here is Dog Scraps’ Best Australian Rap Songs of 2022.
You might think, it’s March of 2023, who cares what happened in 2022, but I’m confident that soon, with the benefit of hindsight, you’ll see just how much hindsight I had and how it made this list so true and perfect.
For any fans of content, we’ve got a veritable content feast for you this week. The writing will be drip-fed over the next five days as we countdown to #1. At the end, I’ll share my full 50 song list and full playlist (which will be updated as I go). So keep the dial locked to the Scraps and boost this shit onto every Instagram feed in Australia.
As we’re always trying to stay on the cutting-edge of content construction for all my contentheads out there, I’m taking an ungodly Instagram-focused approach in how I deliver the music literature, but for all my websiteheads out there, this post will be updated daily and has all the links to listen along and all that good stuff that makes for the best content-consumption experience.
One song per artist. All choices are political; all omissions are personal. If I’m missing someone, put me on don’t put me down.
This website supports all dangerous gender ideologies and the Chinese Communist Party and formally disavows AUKUS and Spanian The Homophobic Spanner. Death to piss-weak guitar beats and fake American accents.
Puerile… the man with the indelible Ooouuhhh. The one who dared to get sexy with it.
After dropping the best pop song of the year as part of his ‘i hate you too’ EP in July, and then the indie-rock-accented ‘Strongboy’, he delivered ‘SODA’— a digital sour strap; a sugary sweet explosion of energy.
The beat, alchemised by Oh Boy and Tanssi, sounds like a computer swallowed a fairy then glitched the fuck out in the most magical way possible. The stitched-together vocal samples give a subtle emotion and the bubblegum synth-lead feeds into this dreamy, twirl-your-hair, kawaii sound. The thick, fuzzed-out drill bass whips around then falls away to allow the booming Jersey club beat to pop up for a bit, then it all drops on its head in dramatic fashion.
There’s so much to love in the production here: the skittering percussion, the dramatic tom smacks, how such a thick mess of 808 slides comes together so elegantly, the random sound effects. It’s got notes of hyperpop, jersey club and drill but when you put it all together it feels like a completely unique product, and what Isaac does on the beat feels like something only Isaac could do.
The song feels like Isaac feat. Puerile, like a completely different rapper handles the second part of the track. We go from cool, calm & cash-collected Isaac on his quiet kingliness, his shawty-in-his-lap with his sesh in hand smooth player shit, where the lyrics aren’t easily audible but the flow is nimble and the gently sung backing vocals add more to the potent mix. Then, after we graciously allow Isaac to get sexy widdit, he kicks intoooOOOOUHH Soul-Purge Puerile, airing out demons and turning up for those he’s lost to the jailyard and the graveyard as he’s setting his sights on mills and the house on the hill.
Isaac’s made some of the toughest music to come out of Australia, but this track shows how dynamic he really is and is a testament to the great music that can be made when dudes stop trying to fit into that same tired street persona and just be a sweetie and get sexy with it. Get you one who can do both.
Puerile is The One.
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There are not many rappers better at conveying disgust with their voice than Shely210. There’s really no better example than on ‘Cooking‘ when he raps “Pshhh fucking disgrace” about some people that are getting on his case. Elsewhere, on his biggest single to date, the instant-classic ‘Taking The Piss’, when he’s talking about some boys who are taking the piss, you can hear in Shely’s voice how despicable he really finds them.
His raps just sting; they hit with such grit and such oomph. He swings his voice around and cracks like a whip at the end rhyme of a bar. Yet, his elastic flow over his signature Spanish guitar beats have the considered elegance of a dancer placing their feet. Furthermore, he seems to have a natural understanding of which words sound good, and how to make words sound good. Ya favourite rapper can’t the say the same. He doesn’t have the words.
Shely sounds amazing saying “beez knees” and, much to the credit of Drake for having such a good Instagram name, he sounds amazing saying “Champagne Papi.” On ‘Bees Kneez’, he has an obsessive hunger for money, and closes out his impassioned verse talking about riding down Kentucky Road and fleeing from coppers through the backstreets of his Riverwood home territory.
I’m using this one entry to honour both Shely and Kahukx, the latter having probably the best Big Hit of the year with the Billie Eilish-sampling ‘Due Time’ – an astonishing achievement for an artist’s first release, even if he does clearly have some backing. Here, Kahukx showcases his gift for bars that blend street raps with romance raps, held up by his irresistibly smooth flow and voice. With Shely taking the first verse and hook duty, Kahukx rocking two verses and cleverly referencing Shely’s songs in his verse, it has that perfect collaborative spirit; the two hometown heroes raising each others hands in the air with medals around their neck.
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For fans of RXK Nephew, Azaelia Banks, Hungry Jacks and Desiigner…
Is it a rap song? It’s far from your average rap beat but that boy Zion Garcia is RAPPING. It has a sort of devilish energy. Mischievous, with a kind of menacing but cheeky undercurrent, and a whole lotta thump and groove courtesy of Sydney’s worst kept secret, Sollyywood AKA Spliff Lorusso.
Zion Garcia has to take the title for most improved. You can hear how increased confidence has made him a better rapper: more expressive on the mic, more charismatic and just generally writing hotter bars that still capture his unique personality. On another heater he released last year, ‘Fried’, I would describe Zion as having geekswag; rapping in a way that feels 90s by virtue of his off-the-wall delivery and jazzy flows, not by virtue of some lame throwback aspirations or dusty, swagless boom-bap vibe.
Zion is leaning into the geekiness and cheekiness, rapping about Pokemon and watching YouTube and synthesising a love of local street rap while throwing out preconceived notions of Western Sydney rappers. On ‘Apply The Pressure’, he speaks on how he’s found himself by not trying to copy other rappers, while not rejecting the influence of artists who are portrayed as more typically Western Sydney. He’s not OneFour but he still backs his section.
Of course, the top-billed player is Mr. Lorusso — the producer with the Midas touch right now — and beats don’t get much more exciting than what he delivers on ‘Apply the Pressure’. It has a skittish, manic energy and never stops evolving throughout the song, taking you down little side trails to wacky, energising moments but always leading back to this thumping bassline and housey beat at the song’s core.
One of the best moments of the song comes when Sollyy interrupts a OneFour-mimicking Zion with a pitched-up sample of New Zealand R&B group Semi MCs*, a group Sollyy says he only knows about because they were friends with his uncles. This reference, coupled with Zion’s interpolations of lines and flows from such local legends as OneFour, Jaecy, ChillinIt and Tkay Maidza, pay homage to the Oceanic music of the past while pushing it’s future into exciting directions.
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*The whole song is built off samples of this song.
Say True God? has a question mark in his name, but really he’s the answer to the question. Whatever the question, STG is the answer. No question. His unique name comes from a “black feller saying when someone is telling a story and you would say, “say true god?” And the person would say “truegod!“ as a way of making sure what’s said is the truth.”
With a Tupac-like passion and a gritty voice that could make hocking up spit sound good, True God was not just wise to try a remix of Lousiana rapper JMB Juvie’s viral song ‘Wicked’, but perfectly fit to capture the spirit of the original while elevating the song to something personal and true to the God.
The original ‘Wicked’ has its origins in a viral video of JMB Juvie performing the song in jail, making the beat by banging surfaces in his cell and humming as he raps about his upbringing and life in the streets with the pained soulfulness you’d expect from someone sitting behind bars. STG manages to match this soulful intensity as he raps about his own experiences as a “troubled young buck” and the struggles that shaped him, like the passing of his great grandmother with whom he lived and who he wishes he could make amends with for the trouble he gave her as a kid.
He also raps about making peace with the alienation he felt coming from a mixed Tongan, Aboriginal and Maori background. As he spoke about with AUD$, due to his more Polynesian appearance, he would go to his cousins’ place who are Indigenous, and be given a hard time for being Polynesian, only for them to realise they’re related when he tells them his name.
On Wicked, he borrows JMB Juvie’s’ flow, but he spits his own truth, and raps as if it’s the last chance he’ll ever get to hold a microphone.
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Babyface Mal was the winner of 2021. In a historic ascent, Mal became one of the hottest rappers in the country, with a mere six incredible singles somehow feeling like a flooding of the streets. 2021 saw Mal expand his sound, bringing his slick, cheeky bars and impeccable smoothness to different styles: he tackled a Michigan beat, slid on a wavy, Marvin Gaye-sampling track and breathed life into the drill sound he’d previously made his domain.
The hook on ‘Smog’ feels confused. Like the feeling where you’ve just woken out of a dream and you know you felt something very deep but, when trying to find the words, you’re foggy about what really happened. Mal saunters over the beat’s soothing harps with a dragged-out flow, producing a cloudy vision of the girl he was dreaming about. The idea of someone who’ll feel for him when he sheds the armor that’s required whether in the streets or in the spotlight, is made to feel like a pipe dream.
Of course, the big one was ‘Ya Rab’ – a blockbuster track that’s overflowing with energy and interesting rhythm, rapping in both English and Arabic over a beat that fuses rap with Middle-Eastern instruments like the oud. What makes it feel special after countless rap songs that sample Arab music is how producer Aywy builds the beat with Middle-Eastern hand drums; the only slightly rap-sounding drums being the jersey-club 808s that appear in the verses, an incredible fusion in and of itself.
Transcending mere novelty, what makes the song great is how Mal spits typically slick and funny bars that are about being Muslim, while also essentially being about what Mal usually raps about: street shit and gyallies, e.g., “I gave tick to this cunt, trust me I’m muslimeen/I ain’t seen him around in a minute, apparently now he’s on his din”. Ultimately, the ethnic solidarity theme underpinning a lot of the fun and the flexing comes centre-stage in the song’s climax, when Mal calls for a free Palestine.
Fuckin’ oath.
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As the ‘Oz Boy’ cover art suggests, Ides makes music about selling drugs in Australia.
After a few years bubbling below the surface, he finally dropped his first project, displaying a fully-formed style and unique musical identity, packaging witty and vivid street bars in a flamboyant, expressive vocal delivery. Ides is among the best in the country with his wordplay and writing, but it’s really his delivery and the way he inflects and stretches his voice when he raps that sets him apart. While it never really turns into singing, his style has a natural melodic quality and a wavy, flamboyant cadence that could only really be described as the Ides sauce.
His bars have great economy-of-words, breezing through vivid images and stories and finding many a slick, funny and original way to rap about his life and the world of drugs and crime in Sydney, with a keen focus on the little details and specific experiences. It’s about the scales, the baggies and vac-seals, the burning dingas on the stove with cutlery to test them and wearing hi-vis to a drop to avoid suspicion.
One of the highlight tracks on a four-track EP with four of them, ‘Trap No More’ finds a disheartened Idesy grappling with his guilt over a fluttering piano loop, watching the all-consuming nature of
his work degrade his relationship and trying to find a way out of the world of stress and paranoia he’s built for himself. It’s Ides at his most evocative, his voice filled with pain as he raps about moments like hearing “a grown man crying cause he’s got withdrawals and you can’t serve more” and moving full weed-growing operations in the back of a hatchback.
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2 0 to the 2 2 saw the return of Kash Kal after a few years of staying quiet. A few years ago, Kal and his twin brother Kash King had come to be some of the biggest figures in the Australian Soundcloud underground, regularly putting out songs with Huskii and making music that was thematically similar to Huskii’s – exploring depression, drugs, life in the streets and hopelessness in general – but took more musical cues from XXXtentacion and other melodic, Soundcloud or ‘emo’ rappers.
With it’s three-verses-no hook structure and it’s boom-bappy beat, it’d be easy to see ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ as a statement – Kal returning to prove that he can turn the autotune off, give you these bars and kick street tales with the best of them. From my undersanding, Kal’s hiatus saw him get off the harder drugs that were a recurring theme of his old music, and it correlates with ‘What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted’ having a generally more sober sound. Over the crisp, soulful beat from Lethal Needle, Kal is a theatrical storyteller, rapping like a wisened hothead looking back at past experiences rather than rapping trouble diary entries.
In the intermissions between verses, you hear Kal speaking through a jail phone, saying they’re trying to lock him up for shit he didn’t do. Later in the year, Kash King also ended up behind bars, only being released in January of ‘23. Across all his new music, Kal has more hostility towards the cops than ever – his hatred and rage amplified by the real pain of being torn away from his loved ones. On ‘What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted’, he sneers at “corrupt coppers in court with a lack of competence”, chuckling at their trial misfortune and wondering why Immigration’s got his brother in a jam over some petty shit while paedophiles are allowed to walk free.
A captivating and cathartic performer on the mic, his raspy voice and impassioned delivery give extra grittiness to his excellent wordplay, imagery, storytelling and obscure references to early 20th century Olympian John Hicks and old school Australian gangster Squizzy Taylor. In the third verse, Kal masterfully raps a short memoir about he and his brother’s time having to sleep in the streets, creeping with hands in their sleeves looking for keys, and ultimately ending up in prison greens with the silver lining of a free dinner.
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In this annual tradition of enthroning that spans a history of three years (with a one year hiatus), I’ve always devoted one entry to an artist’s full project rather than a single song. This year, as I did with Jaal’s ‘Paradox’ in 2021, I’m listing Logan rapper Juwan’s entire ‘Let The Story Begin’ mixtape, not simply because it’s only listenable on SoundCloud, but because it’s an incredibly solid, perfectly assembled and musically rich project that I have top-to-tailed countless times – my favourite project of the year.
As a rapper, Juwan is staunch and wise; heartfelt and headstrong. He’s got a whole lotta Nipsey in him, and his music captures that same determination, thoughtfulness and authenticity. Every word comes from the heart, and he sounds as grateful as he does hungry. He pours that heart out with great clarity and urgency, in neat, punchy, often slyly funny bars, always willing to take the piss out of the fakery and the wannabeefers.
In his commitment to honesty, he has the rare gift of rapping about a girl without pretending he doesn’t actually care about her, painting a puppy-dog-cute picture on ‘IN2U’ of his head-over-heels feelings for a girl. His gift for pouring out his heart with such emotion and clarity is exemplified best in the tear-jerking closer ‘Baked Bread’, where he raps about the limitless generosity and love found in his 14-sibling-strong family’s two-storey home, focusing in on their youthful camaraderie in the face of parental discipline, the little commonplace sacrifices like short showers so everyone gets some hot water and giving his little sister the food off his plate so she eats enough, and the fresh-baked bread and porridge with sugar that graced their table.
Across this tape, he adapts his abilities to a great variety of beat types, as if Sollyy’s putting him through a series of drills at training. Without taking any credit away from Juwan, the project’s high quality is largely courtesy of the namesake of the Sollyywood sign that rests atop St. Mary’s train station, who produced the tape in its entirety (save for a freestyle of Lil Ugly Mane’s classic “Throw Dem Gunz”), flexing his range as he plays with a bevy of classic samples.
There’s a lot of confidence required to tackle some of these samples and old songs. Giving your own spin on the utterly perfect Swishahouse classic ‘Still Tippin’ is brave, but with a just-fresh-enough flip of the same sample from Sollyy on ‘Persistent’ and a powerful performance from Juwan, they more than get away with it. The next track shares a Luther Vandross sample with Gangsta Pat’s ‘I Wanna Smoke’, then an Alicia Keys sample provides the hook and beat on a slow-burn love song. Later, Sollyy samples one of Drake’s best songs ‘From Time’ – recalibrating the rhythm of that song into a jerky, heartfelt jam – and even samples ‘Crank Dat’ by Soulja Boy to great effect, reimagining it with some 808 slides like he does with ‘Still Tippin’. On songs like ‘IN2U’, where Juwan interacts with a sample of R&B group SWV in the beat, you see how, locking in for the full project, they’ve become collaborative songwriters more so than a producer sending beats to a rapper.
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Queen P first caught my attention when she stole the show on ‘My One’, her afrobeats-flavoured collaboration with (retired?) Swish Music commander-in-chief Dau Dau. So self-assured, she had a playful chemistry with Dau Dau who she mocked for not being able to handle her. With ‘Turn It Up’, her first solo release in two years, she took that commanding confidence to another level.
From the jump, P brings an incredible sultriness and lyrics that will really make you sweat. She talks about putting on her two-piece only to take it right off again and then how an unnamed fella likes it when she drips so he can lick it off. She’s an object of worship come to life, having fun with the power of her own sex appeal.
The second verse is marvelous, rapping about one lick sending a boy delirious, joking around with her girls and sitting on a big boy’s lap like he’s Santa. She does it with such charm, like a burlesque host that’s walking around an adoring crowd, sliding a finger on the shoulder of different guests as she delivers each line. There are shades of Nicki in these theatrical voice shifts but she has a natural voice with its own unique character.
Then, of course, you’ve got this absolutely banging beat from JILLA. It’s primal. Big, epic noises in a simple melody over a big, bassy beat will always move people, but the strange guitar sounds are particularly cool here and the booty-clappin’ end section of the hook has this dramatic build to it that just makes the song sound so BIG and rousing.
Queen P has the charisma to make it to work.
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I know, I know. Huskii is the GOAT, no one else is in his league, putting him #10 is blasphemous, rah rah rah. You’re probably right! ‘Antihero’ just didn’t get as much burn on my stereo as the 2021 singles did. So I’m gonna talk about them for a sec.
On the first single ‘Ruin My Life’, Huskii again proved himself as (probs) the best rapper in the country without needing to rap about the lowest points of his life, rapping more as drug dealer than drug user, talking his shit with a focus on the street escapades that bookend the lonely, sedated moments. Huskii is funny, and on this tape and the last one, he’s devoting more time to funny wordplay and outrageous shit talk. It’s the most we’ve ever heard him flexing, but even as he’s bragging about being comfy drinking vino and sleeping in Valentino, he never gets too far from his morbid, self-destructive fascinations.
The other best song was the closer ‘Toxic’, where Huskii’s high and alone in a penthouse suite, feeling like a burden, just as depressed as he was in the traphouse. It’s gold-standard, tortured Huskii shit, venting about his toxic relationships, self-loathing and self-destructive ways. The second verse is more about the industry and how he’s navigated it and stayed independent, avoiding label deals he calls rorts.
Now, the singing. The full-belt singing at the end of the song is actually convincing enough, but ultimately, I don’t think his singing voice carries nearly as much emotion as his regular rapping voice and the over-the-top outro that it’s used in just reminds me of the worst maximalist impulses of a generation that worships My Beautiful Dark Fantasy. Guy like me doesn’t need all that, but Antihero was nonetheless a wonderful project, allowing Huskii to play with his actual sound a bit more with the help of such a competent multi-instrumental as Tasker.
Luckily, there is enough incredible rapping to satisfy a guy like me and, as always, the bars and rhyme schemes are technical and brilliant enough to think a robot wrote them if they weren’t so creative, witty, devastating and deranged.
He could’ve been #1, but I can’t be seen agreeing with the ARIA charts.
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The first sound that you hear in ‘Frauds’ sounds something like a super-charged DJ reload played through a sportscar engine. Suitably, for a sound that probably isn’t too far from what you hear when you’re about to get hit by a car, this sound jumps you and attacks you over-and-over in this song, like a dopamine-packed defibrillator charge.
Vv Pete has been a name on many radars and a rapper on many stages for a couple of years now, thanks in part to the popularity of an Instagram clip posted in 2019 that shows Vv, sat in an office chair in a small room, spitting bars for a small crowd that was mostly kids and other artists, including Mt. Druitt compatriots OneFour. The slightly awkward audience quickly becomes lit-up with smiles and filming cameras. As the clip’s videographer and triple platinum O.G. Hau Latukefu attested to, Vv had a clear star quality and showmanship, and rapped like she’d been in the game for years. It felt reminiscent of the rappers of old who would hone their skills spitting on street corners, and had to come absolutely correct when they finally got their chance to rap for a label head like Jay-Z.
Vv made her long awaited debut with ‘Bussit’, a rumbling turn-up anthem playing on Blueface’s ‘Thotiana‘. Not long after, she dropped ‘Frauds’, where Vv builds off the blueprint of a song seen in that Instagram clip, kicking those same patois-filled bars over a way cooler beat.
One thing you can count on with producer Utility is a tight ass mix and regular things like pianos, subtle synths and 808s having an added depth and texture, while Cassius Select, not typically a rap producer, is sure to provide the harsh and strange sounds found in his eclectic club beats. Ultimately, it all hinges on the moments of Vv rapping “Them girls is frauds, copies of Vv Pete of course” – an incredible earworm anchoring a hook I’d be happy to hear looped for an entire song.
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Even before he linked up with Chub.e for the immaculately smooth ‘Chubby Tape’, Yibby has been one of the niftiest beat selectors and curators in this, our local league of rap performers. His 2021 EP ‘Tangent’ was an eclectic mix of sounds, with big, beautiful alt-R&B songs with Chanel Loren alongside strange song like ‘Plot’, with its strange accordion beat and general drugged-at-a-carnival feel that he uses to tell his stories about coming-of-age around drugs.
On this tape from 2022, Yibby instead burrows into one sound, matching the warmth, smoothness and joyousness of Choob-E’s soul-sampling beats for the full seven songs. Yibby has never sounded flyer, keeping it loose, rapping about his favourite threads, his modest luxuries, getting to the cheque, and the well-dressed women he so adores, all with a laid-back, good-humored charm. It’s the type of music that could spread it’s debonair elegance and joyousness onto any moment it soundtracks, more perfect than any playlist for any situation that involves sunshine and homies.
It’s hard to pick a favourite from the tape, which manages to feel so cohesive without any songs really sounding the same. It could be the introductory ‘Syd City’ tribute which sets the smoothest of tones or the upliftingly beautiful love song ‘You Bring The Sun Out’. ‘Late Nights’, however, feels ascendant. Tuned into a higher plane. It possesses an elegance and exultation and sheer prettiness that’s not easy to come by in this mortal realm, making the chug of the late-night grind feel spiritual and celebratory.
I suppose The Chubby Tape is comparable to the Butter burgers that have featured so heavily in the album’s marketing. It’s not trying to be fine-dining, but it’s a simple pleasure like fast food (or smooth raps over soul samples) done incredibly tastefully.
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Ay Huncho only became a good rapper when he started dissing OneFour.
It’s an unfortunate fact, but even if you disagree and want to put a shank in my chest and my lungs for that, one can’t deny that the hatred in his heart has unlocked a whole new mode of rapping. Sounding manic with bloodlust, he now raps with this scratchy, full-throated, viscerally shouted delivery and an energy and passion that just wasn’t there before he really brought his issues with the Aus Drill Golden Boys to wax. It’s like he finally cares about what he’s rapping about.
At the end of 2021, he was singing hooks like A Boogie in an embarrassing American accent and filling out the verses with pure mediocrity. Since ‘Putrid Shit’, he’s maintained this guttural, relentless aggression in a bunch of songs, most of which are essentially diss tracks towards OneFour but not always as direct as this one. It’s an “Aussie version of ‘hit em up’” as Zayn Emrah says in the YouTube comment section, where a whole lot of people can be found admitting that, even though they love OneFour, this song is hard as hell.
Ay Huncho gets the most media attention of probably any rapper in Australia, moreso for his alleged involvement with the Alameddine crime family than for his music. I can’t help but see ‘Putrid Shit’ as a parallel to the diss tracks that have come out of the NBA Youngboy-Lil Durk beef, representative of the state of rap disses in the wake of drill music’s blunt cruelty towards real-life victims of gang violence.
Just like with Durk and YB, these are two of a country’s most high-profile rappers engaged in a feud in a beef that goes much deeper than rap and is tied to real-world violence. OneFour have not dissed Ay Huncho on a song, while Huncho has made several tracks targeting OneFour and almost made it his whole personality. The escalation of the beef is worrying, and feels less in the tradition of battle rap than it is a way to add some insult to rivalries that are more concerned with injury.
The song is just crushingly dark and cruel, Huncho scraping the barrel for all the most disrespectful shit he could think to say. The beat and it’s sample feels like it could kick off a funeral ceremony or a bloody battle, while the viscerally violent raps are a mix of death threats and schoolyard taunts. It’s an ugly song, but it’s sure to make you feel something.
In AU Dollars’ 2022 Cash Madness poll, ‘Putrid Shit’ was voted the second best song of the year. Wartime presidents are always more popular.
On his ‘Sv22-1 – EP’, Sevy the Snowcat – the shape-shifting bb void bad bich, an ethereal entity oohing autotuned aahs in a dimension just outside our own – fuses the spacey, pretty, delicate sounds of pluggnb music with the drums and rhythms of afrobeats, amapiano and Zambian dancehall. It’s a departure from his darker, deeper-voiced work with Bayang & Utility, and shows off the remarkable vocal versatility he possesses.
Happy to put cute raps on cute beats, Sevy avoids the trappings and pretenses of more masculine rappers, inhabiting his dreamy worlds of sound with a glowing, whole-hearted affection and sentimentality. He’s raw, sexual and boundlessly expressive in that Young Thuggish way, but more tender and less hedonistic than many that carry that torch.
His flexes and fantasies are unique; on ‘Spine’ he flaunts an irresistibly cute smile, while commenting on someone else’s lack thereof, saying “the way he doesn’t know how to smile that is WACK! If I’m cheesing too much then you’re TRAPPED!” Elsewhere, on the Teether-featuring ‘Pullup‘, amidst a brew of autotune croons and yearning calls to his adoring lover, he fantasises about toting a gun and running up on Scott Morrison.
‘Bb Void Bad Bich’ is like a theme song for the titular bad bich, an alter-ego of Sevy’s, perhaps, who adopts the demonic aggression of his enemies – the overlords of our Babylonian society – to best combat the forces of evil in the name of love and beauty. I simply think an unhinged Sevy saying ‘bb void bad bich’ and wailing a warbled “yeah, yeah, yeah” over-and-over sounds amazing in this stew of frenetic synths and fuzzy, melodious 808s.
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With a deep baritone voice like an Australian Pop Smoke, it’s hard to believe Vahsoong is only 16. Beyond his incredible voice, he has a wisened perspective, musical vision and self-assuredness that feels beyond his years.
In a song from the year before, he shows his age when he raps about his mate getting snitched on and suspended from school, but ‘Cop Car’ had me convinced he was a grown man for months until I did a deeper dive. While not quite a newcomer, he’s certainly one of the most exciting young rappers coming up right now, and was justly honoured by Sir Ben Madden in Acclaim’s list of Perth rappers to watch.
Vahsoong has an interesting way of phrasing things and a restrained writing style, avoiding cliché and spitting succinct bars that can leave you with more questions than answers (a quite literal example being “Just did a little run, now what the fuck should I mix with vodka?”) The song takes it’s title from the opening line “Left home on a scooter, came back in a cop car”, where he captures a quintessential scene for a kid out getting in trouble, but leaves the night’s dramas to the imagination.
As Earl Sweatshirt said, “[rappers] be victims of overwriting bro. You can hear when it switches from the heart to the head.” Vahsoong’s music comes from the heart.
Over the self-produced beat’s chirpy guitars and the sweet rumble of the sliding 808s, Vahsoong sounds as smooth as he does gruff (ala Pop Smoke, it bears repeating), loosely rapping about the aftermath of a ‘job’ of the illegal kind and the loyalty and brotherly love that surrounds it.