#10 - Asian Doll ft. Bandmanrill - "Get Jumped" & Bandmanrill - "BANDTHOVEN" (tie)

Dec 21, 2022

I don’t know if it’s possible to listen to “Get Jumped” without bopping your head or jumping around in a frenetic sprint-dance. There’s no messing around with an extended intro/outro here, it’s just two minutes of pogoing kicks, clipped vocals, a smooth sample and infectious, swift raps from Asian Doll and Bandmanrill.

In recent months, I’ve gravitated toward the more distorted corner of Jersey club (thanks in large part to billdifferen’s stellar recommendations; peep this ridiculous nightmarish mix), but it’s a joy to hear the two rappers glide over a particularly buoyant instrumental (produced by Bankroll Got It). It feels almost like we’re watching them ricochet around a trampoline at nightcore speed. Jersey club rap is such a cool sound, partly because of the way it forces the vocalists to bend around the beat—either go crazy or get swallowed up by the typhoon of kicks—and because of how it both hypnotizes and energizes listeners. The stuttering rhythm of the drums can make you feel like you’re transcending, slipping into a daze of hectic footwork, but the frantic raps are constantly jutting out and seizing your attention.

It’s a fantastically frenzied combination, often made even more enticing by the unorthodox samples used by Jersey club producers. Any genre or time period is up for grabs, from Steve Lacy’s 2022 “Bad Habit” and “Miss the Rage” to Minecraft music and Mai Yamane’s 1980 “Tasogare.” As ridiculous as it sounds, even classical music can be thrown into the max-power blender of kick drums. For Bandmanrill’s deliriously atemporal “BANDTHOVEN,” McVertt snatched the intro of Ludwig’s “5th Symphony” and looped it to oblivion. Like Playboi Carti’s century-defying Bach rewire “Vamp Anthem,” it delicately rides the line between “meme music” and bizarrely scintillating—imagine a moshpit in a symphony hall.

The list:

#25 - Destroy Lonely - “NOSTYLIST”

#24 - elusin - “Elksling”

#23 - skaiwater - “#miles”

#22 - Wednesday - “Bull Believer”

#21 - islurwhenitalk - “pink neon lights”

#20 - Two Shell - “home” & “Memory” (tie)

#19 - Luci4 - “ON GANG”

#18 - Harto Falión - “{*______*}” (prod. evilgiane, whitearmor, Gud)

#17 - lecie - “ex post facto”

#16 - Yung Lean ft. FKA twigs - “Bliss”

#15 - DJ:ReCode - “adhd” ft. tobre & “keeper” ft. goji! & BIO (tie)