#4 - xaviersobased - "u dk how 2 hoop" / Nettspend ft. Osamason - "Wake up" (tie)
xaviersobased and Nettspend are burning the underground up right now. When Nettspend blew up this fall, I didn’t understand what drew everyone to the 16-year-old like a magnet; his music seemed like a glossy, radio-clean version of the hyperactive jerk sound xaviersobased was toying with. Listen again and it’s clear this kid has a Michelin star taste for stylishly freaky beats—there isn’t a single speck of forgettable dust or wasted space in his music. He’ll open with jarring exclamations (“yooo,” “like like like like,” “Waaaah”) and stretch out Auto-Tuned syllables like a lisping robot. Some of my favorite tracks have no intro and just drown you in a flood of elegant chaos—an instrumental style I like to think of as hyperclutter. Songs like “Wake up” and “Model Sex,” Ken Carson’s “Me N My Kup,” Osamason’s “Lil O,” where seemingly 18 different layers of synth, keys, drums, and gurgles convulse tightly against each other.
Even deeper in the blaze of delirium, the beat for “u dk how 2 hoop” practically feasts upon xaviersobased’s voice, deforming and destroying his brags in the humongous low end. The bass is cranked up so high it should come with a hearing loss warning. I can only imagine this is what it feels like to stick your head in lava and melt your brain until your pain receptors are gone and your vision becomes a hallucinatory blur. Xavier is the arch nemesis of libraries.
The list:
#10 - bar italia - "Missus Morality" / "maddington" (tie)
#9 - Ken Carson - “Lose It” / “Me N My Kup” (tie)
#7 - saya - “blood school” / sprinks - “Paradox” (tie)