#25 - Destroy Lonely - NOSTYLIST

Sometimes I wonder what the lyrical appeal is of rappers like Yeat, Ken Carson, and Destroy Lonely. Sure, their beats have some of the most gloriously unhinged and futuristic production right now — that’s mainly why I’m listening — but I’m curious why fans obsess over the frequently awful lyrics, spamming them on Twitter and TikTok. For these diehards, the rappers are not just disembodied voices ad-libbing into the aural ether but role models and tastemakers; every piece of designer clothing they wear is bought by a stan somewhere, everything they say is a maxim to mimic.

A lot of it comes down to effortless charisma, or the perception of it. I can see why people fawn over Lone. There’s an elegance to his voice — perpetually radiant and unblemished, it’s the vocal equivalent of editors airbrushing the micro-spots and sweaty pores off someone’s face. “Bitch, I wake up, no stylist,” he brags, spitting shimmering pixels with every syllable. His boasts are often banal—”Fly across the globe,” “Told my folks I’m getting rich”—but told with such stainless opulence they flash alive in your brain. The flexes have a kind of simple rawness that adds to the allure, like he’s too busy to write out a full sentence. This song bangs in large part because of Cxdy and Chef9thegod’s holographic instrumental. It’s like a more thrillingly electric upgrade of Carti’s “Sky,” which already has a dizzying magic carpet ride of a beat.

When Destroy Lonely’s debut dropped, I was in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, driving a lot. I vividly remember zooming across town with this song jetting out of the speakers, throwing the volume up and rolling all the windows down. Cool Santa Monica wind rushing through my hair. I didn’t really like the album (not enough beat variation, and Lone’s endless polish makes everything congeal into sleek gloop after a while; I wish it had more of the kind of fuzzy trap he tagged “Ambient” on SoundCloud), but this song kept smacking. It straddles the line between “organically pristine” and “so pristine it’s revoltingly plastic-sounding” (a la “Miss the Rage”) in an uncanny way. You keep thinking you’re going to tire of it but it never wears.

OJC’s “NOSTYLIST” mashup with Crystal Castles’ “Crimewave” is also killer.