#4 - Luci4 aka Axxturel - "dying in xxtyle (trendxxetter 3)" / "dead n gone" (prod. Hollywood J) (tie)

Dec 21, 2021

Luci4, also known by the nom de rap Axxturel, has had a bigger year than almost every other underground rapper. He scored four TikTok hits in 2021 (including one that spawned a visually thrilling TikTok dance called “glitching” that I covered for Insider) and he’s inspired a wave of copycats imitating his malevolent beats, doomsday vocals and occult aesthetic. The Atlantic signee has invented an entire dialect of demented rap music. He’s made ASMR horrorcore and chopped up the “iCarly” theme into a serrated beat. While perhaps his GOAT tracks (“BodyPartz,” “All Eyez on Me,” “Ave Domina Lilith,” “2 Steppin on Necks,” and “Jimmy Choo”) came out last year or earlier, he’s released a number of mind-bending tunes this Earth rotation, notably “dying in xxtyle” and “Dead n Gone.”

A quick primer on Luci4’s music, paraphrased from my interview with Music Journalism Insider:

The songs are packed with hisses and robotic gurgles, moshpit-hard bass thuds, eerie synths, and pixelated sound effects. Luci4 used to get all his song thumbnails from Blingee, this defunct GIF website with a bizarre kind of kitschy medieval old-internet look: lots of corny skeletons and roses and demonic-looking creatures. The music itself sounds so frayed yet futuristic, the visual component gives it this out-of-time, phantasmic parallel world kind of vibe.

“Dying in XXtyle” and “Dead n Gone” are pure exercises in sense-overload. Every inch of audio space is thronged with astonishing sounds. In the former, pillars of bass slam against Luci4’s glitch-wracked voice while creepy chimes and slot machines ring out and synths spin like a car going full throttle in an early ‘90s racing game.

The Hollywood J-produced “Dead n Gone” sounds like the soundtrack to a medical experiment gone wrong; I imagine its fizzy hi-hats and oozy woozy electronic pulses coming out of a set of huge speakers in a chemlab staffed with white-coated spirit creatures. There are so many little components—a quick laugh effect, a layer of nearly imperceptible stutters firing off beneath his vocals at points, mini-explosion sounds—that knit together a tapestry of astral textures.