Incredible discovery this year. Highly addictive, guiltily replayable, deeply relatable.
Sharp cuts, frenetic loops and a great dose of “fuck it” make a 2 minute listen feel like a full ride already. I take this one out with me on my phone for a walk in the park, when I’m looking for high feelings and my legs to take me to surprising places.
This is a contortionist-sound-collage for city-life broken contortionists, our brains and bodies trying to harmonise – and it somehow works. “darkskin niggas with lightskin problems” as an Epic Collage is not just a landscape of a myriad of samples but a whole architecture you inhabit and constantly mutates; it’s a nectar you take, puts your limbs “back in action” and there’s nothing you can do about it – that’s just how that opening track makes you feel already.
As our grain of attention shrinks harder and harder in the TikTok era, a vastness of places where it can go opens up too. A maximalism of possibilities, tools, styles, scales, tones, textures – this collab between heavensouls and stickerbush feels like a tight mirror of this modern trickery we’re living, addressing the reality of the day to day struggle, identity, racism and the overload of information we’re exposed and consume. We can go from insane acidic stimulus to mind-bogging brain rot in a second, or a liberating crack in the skull shedding light to the universe. It’s existential, high-energy, very playful and deliciously unpredictable. Without a doubt one of the peaks of this year.
You can buy darkskin niggas with lightskin problems digital album on bandcamp and CD via Caper Flower. Support musicians.
Favourite tracks: southern style lemon peppers, i am not your savior and bitch gimme my kicks back (and could choose more!)
