An Introduction to the Ambient Rap Scene – Warungku Terkini

Since Whole Lotta Red, the rage rap arms race has been chugging along, but how much more of the maximalist production styles, rabid flows, and “punk” aesthetics, designed to soundtrack the gnarliest moshpits (and sell a lot of band tees), can we take? I’ve been feeling this fatigue since the combo of OsamaSon’s Jump Out and Che’s Rest In Bass hit the e-streets. Sure, both tapes pushed the distorted pandemonium to the brink, but they also stripped away the regional specificity of the Opium-born sound, creating a replicable formula that has more to do with havoc than any musical lineage. It’s a placelessness that I felt a lot this year, as memeable rage rap 2.0 artists like Slayr and 2Slimey became the talk of the web; it wasn’t that the music was that bad, it was just that it felt secondary.

Around the same time, I was having daily conversations with Olivier in the Big Condé Nast offices about a new producer-forward scene emerging on SoundCloud that seemed to be running in the direction opposite of rage. Pulling from the minimalist nightmares of DMV and Philly drill, plugg’s swaggy bounce, pre-pandemic Lucki’s stoned fatalism, wonky StepTeam drums, and video game soundtracks, these incredibly quiet and hermetic ambient tracks became our latest obsession. Often made by anonymous rappers and producers with a monkish dedication to their craft, this isn’t rap for the live show but for the headphones, music where every muttered word and barely-there snare matters. Sometimes these songs are uncomfortably raw and honest, other times they’re sort of silly in their near-nothingness. I know “underground rap” has become a lazy shorthand for all Rolling Loud-core music, but to me, this is really what it is. Here are 11 songs we’ve been sending back and forth to each other.

suckrball: “alone” (prod. by 1act)

Within ambient rap, a sprawling SoundCloud terrain that’s almost solely dictated by vibes and melody, suckrball stands out as a lyrically vivid bloodletter. He’s a big part of SIE–an internet-first, dispersed collective–alongside other introverts like 22, sheroy, hunnakay, and kllhhr. Backed by aching spirals of piano, “alone” drops suckrball into a moonlit, hours-long drive with a girl he trusts more than he realizes. He sees right past her, but she’s a crutch for him regardless—at least for the moment. “I get real tired of hearing yo’ voice, but never knew how to break it off,” suckrball admits, dour and nervy. As his tussles with grief and sobriety and heartbreak appear in flashes, so do red and blue police lights. “I don’t know what I got in my bag/Shit could be over,” he laments, and the pain of that realization cuts deep. —Olivier Lafontant