#8 - GREED - "summer mixx 2k22"

Dec 23, 2022

Maybe the most electrifying underground rap collective right now is GREED. Its current and former artists are making some of the weirdest and wildest fuck-the-mainstream music of this era—and most of them seem to be young, bred on a diet of Roblox, fried memes, cartoons, and brain-blistering internet rap. The group is full of diverse styles, but it’s at least partially defined by blasts of bass shards and spectral vocals mixed with sickly bright synth melodies, so raw and spartan it sounds like it was produced on a barebones DAW like Audacity. The beats are some of the grimiest, most feculent and frayed I’ve ever heard, sputtering like malfunctioning motorcycles in a pit of mud. It’s nearly the inverse of other trendy internet rap genres—dreamy pluggscapes and digicore’s intricately produced compositions. Lushness and stability are foreign concepts in this realm; the native language is atrophy and apocalypse.

GREED’s summer mix is a frantic compression of the collective’s expansive catalog, squeezing 18 tracks by 27 performers and producers into 14 minutes of hyperkinetic dissonance. Some songs play for under 30 seconds before crashing into the next; yuke’s cute but serrated “hi tech” with jaydes only gets a nine-second hook. It’s a highlight reel for the GREED Extended Universe: there’s *67 and yuke’s neon-green collective anthem “greed” and Maplekore inventor kaystrueno’s “want and feel,” which sounds like an angel kingdom collapsing as it falls to an insurgent army of demons; there’s zinoblade’s “ddos in effect,” which spirals and glitches like your Wi-Fi connection is literally being flooded with excess traffic in live-time, and even a pixelated flip of “Big Poppa” by *67, pegasisflame, and thukk, in which Biggie’s vocals have been excised and replaced by defiled vocal layers and unsettling giggle effects.

While not everyone in the mix is explicitly in the group—the blogger and YouTube archivist Arai told me the collective’s roster is perpetually mutating, with loads of people passing through the group in a year—it’s a thrilling look into this distorted and desiccated chasm of SoundCloud. Internet collectives are ephemeral ecosystems, often collapsing from petty or vicious beefs and infighting, so it’s cool to see a group statement that captures this moment in time when many of the artists are still discovering their sounds and sparking creatively off each other.

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)