There’s reason to be skeptical of the calculated chaos that has critics fawning over skaiwater. Add a weeping sample here, throw in a burnt 808 pattern there, make a brash new rap sound palatable to poptimists… aren’t we a little tired of this after Travis Scott? But then I turn on a song quite literally called “pop” and it all melts away. Maybe because skaiwater’s frag-rap pyrotechnics are not so much the point as they are the scaffolding for what’s becoming a dagger of a pen.
“pop,” initially released on skaiwater’s SoundCloud burner account a few months ago, makes the best case for skaiwater’s mad science since last year’s staggering single “rain.” Like that song, “pop” sounds like a flower emerging from the rubble of an OsamaSon tape. But on a writing level, “pop” is a pressure cooker inside which a relationship is imploding. In two verses sandwiched by a big, “Bound 2”-ass hook, skaiwater raps in wispy, forlorn swooshes, like a baby-voice Carti hurriedly narrating walls of text about doing everything to make this shit work with their partner. Over a twangy loop laden with choral notes that Ye might’ve used two decades ago to do stressed-out, blue-collar raps, skaiwater gasps, “I’ve been working overtime for you, bae.” They make relationship blues feel like your heart’s falling out of your chest and 20 stories down.
