Kiss the Ring was a triumphant moment for Rome Streetz, the culmination of a long-simmering underground career filled with razor-edged street raps and furrowed-brow beats. It was Rome’s Griselda debut, extending a hot streak for the prestige label that kicked into high gear with Westside Gunn’s 2020 magnum opus, Pray for Paris. Gunn tapped the perfect team of gritty-but-trippy producers for Rome’s nasal, piston-firing delivery, and Rome seemed to dip his pen in acid. There’s an argument that Kiss the Ring was the apotheosis of the Griselda sound, the last moment before the dam broke and flooded DSPs with half-hearted boom-bap revival drums and vaguely hard-nosed coke raps. Rome has struggled to fully separate himself from the glut; subsequent records, like 2023’s Noise Kandy 5 and Hatton Garden Holdup, his 2024 linkup with founding Griselda producer Daringer, feel like walking in circles—Rome’s in constant motion, but headed nowhere. Trainspotting, his new collaboration with Conductor Williams, is a solid, mostly successful attempt at a reset. Conductor produced nearly half of Kiss the Ring, and the album builds upon their excellent chemistry. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes entrancing listen, even if it falls a little short of their previous magic.
Rome’s main strength is his capacity to make acrobatic rapping sound easy. He’s a masterful technician in perpetual motion, churning out stanzas that fill every space of a beat with mesmeric precision. He can take somewhat pedestrian rhyme schemes and break them into syllabic math problems, creating tension that leads to startling payoffs. The lines, “I’ve been shittin’ on every cheap rinky-dink rendition/Do somethin’ different, you’ll probably get a listen/I’m in Louis linen, lit in Lisbon, livin’,” on the second verse of “Connie’s Revenge,” don’t exactly push the bounds of slant rhyme, but he moves around the downbeat like a deft boxer, landing the end of each phrase when you least expect it. It’s thrilling to hear him nail a particularly daring bar structure and never break a sweat.
The problem is that Rome’s writing doesn’t always match up to his technical prowess. He seems more interested in maintaining a mythos than in pushing his pen to new heights—the punchlines aren’t really zingers, and the boasts of microphone or sexual prowess come off a bit first-thought best-thought. His stories feel authentic to him, but distant to the listener; it’s the feeling you get when you stare at a word long enough to forget its meaning. Conductor’s trippy, off-kilter style suits his sneering delivery well, but it’s disappointing to hear a rapper with such commanding presence issue boilerplate rhymes like, “You sold your soul to the pied piper/Shit I touch turn to gold, I’m a prime-time rhyme writer,” over production this weird. Overall, these songs sound great, but you could control-x any of Rome’s verses, paste them on any beat from the Griselda extended universe, and not really notice.
