#6 - lostrushi - "HYDROXYCUT" / "USE YOUR WINGS"
#6 - lostrushi - "HYDROXYCUT" / "USE YOUR WINGS"
Two years ago, lostrushi was part of a microgenre called “maplekore” with kaystrueno, who coined the term after staring at pixelated scenery in the old-school Korean MMORPG MapleStory. The two released brief singles built around impressionistic, dreamy sounds. Then kaystrueno went mysteriously absent, and almost like a prophecy, lostrushi picked up the mantle. He exploded and evolved the maplekore palette on his first album SISTERHOOD, a retrofuturist universe of holographic confetti and digi-dazzle.
“HYDROXYCUT” and “USE YOUR WINGS” are the night and day of this fantasy world. The former is shiveringly fitful, erupting like a motherboard spasming under hot goo, while “USE YOUR WINGS” gallivants with the gentle grace of a dancer stretching out on a wide open plateau. Despite the claustrophobic mixing, which gives tracks the gauzy distance of a vignette unfolding on a TV screen, the sounds expand and saturate like a 5D panorama. It’s a whole new language of fairie textures: swooning cheeps, somnambulant grunts, multi-stereo glitches, effervescent gurgles.
Today’s underground is dominated by flashy singles and experimental one-offs, and whenever a bedroom rapper with 5,000 SoundCloud followers releases a full-length record it’s usually half-baked. So the instinctual response to someone announcing an album is skepticism: They can’t pull it off. And in a streaming environment that rewards data dumps packed with copy-paste filler, there’s not much incentive for rising artists to spend months or years fleshing out a project and risk it flopping anyway. lostrushi’s SISTERHOOD shatters all that cynicism. There are zero features and lostrushi sculpted every inch of production. It’s probably the best “internet” rap album of the year. No artist from this amorphous SoundCloud generation has carried an LP with such an insular yet compelling sound-palette since quannnic’s Kenopsia.
The list:
#10 - bar italia - "Missus Morality" / "maddington" (tie)