In the first half of the 2010s, artists like Shy Glizzy, Fat Trel, and Lightshow steered DC metro area youth toward homegrown rap, though their sound mirrored much of what was happening in Southern rap nationally. Somewhere around 2015, kids who’d come of age during those pioneering acts’ ascension began developing a style that felt distinctive to the DMV. It’s a shift that can’t be fully understood without Sparkheem. Alongside beatmakers like Cheecho and Dolan Beats, he distinguished the sound of local street music in the mid-to-late 2010s with ominous keys, interpretations of DC’s go-go drum patterns, and a barrage of sound effects that created an atmosphere of playfulness and gloom. Sparkeem’s contribution to that formation is singular, though. More than his contemporaries, he’s cultivated a presence in just about every micro-scene within the larger DMV underground.
The organ he incorporated into Q Da Fool’s 2017 track “Backyard” feels like a direct descendant of the churchiness Zaytoven fed Gucci Mane’s early trap confessionals. The mystic synths he administered on Lil Xelly’s 2018 single “BBQ” creep behind the quintessential skipping hi-hats. In 2019, for Lil Gray—a rapper who inspires Sparkheem’s most adventurous production—he flipped an early 2000s jingle for Maryland car dealership Eastern Motors into something you’d hear at the club. His broad reach in and outside the local scene made Sparkheem and his production partners Mannyvelli and Spizzledoe attractive to Maryland-raised R&B superstar Brent Faiyaz, who brought the three to his ISO Supremacy label. Soon after, Sparkheem contributed to Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby,” one of the biggest hits of last year.
With a 4x platinum record under his belt, the producer releases Now That’s What I Call Crank! 25, a 23-track mixtape co-billed with An1 that reflects Sparkheem’s shine back onto the present-day DMV rap landscape. Since 2019, Sparkheem has dropped five projects similarly reminiscent of physical DJ mixtapes, each acting as a survey of the local scene’s evolution—a census of newcomers and mainstays alike. This one starts with an unheard track from the late PG County rapper Goonew, whose delivery and staggered flow made it all the way to France before he was killed in 2022. Titled “Start My Day,” it flips, decelerates, and adds choppy drums to the instrumental from Britney Spears’ “Toxic” beneath Goonew’s signature whisper.
Now That’s What I Call Crank! 25 bridges two related yet distinct eras of DMV underground rap. When Sparkheem rose to prominence in the 2010s, many of the scene’s most popular artists achieved virality by finding pockets within the beats of popular songs from their childhood that hadn’t yet been mined for samples. That was the Crank era. Sparkheem captures it on “Like Dat,” which recruits Landover, Maryland’s Xanman (aka Xanservin) and, like Xan’s best work, joins the sensibilities of 2000s R&B with the cadence of a contemporary rap singer. Here, between sweet promises of Palm Angel outfits and hazy nights out, Xan interpolates the hook from Laila!’s “Like That!” On “Do Not Enter,” Sparkheem chops up the beat from Trick Daddy’s 2001 hit “I’m a Thug” while Lil Gray and DC’s CartiEars cram as many words as possible into bars about living on the edge. As with Goonew on “Start My Day,” Sparkheem offers these tracks as quintessential Crank records, presenting DMV reimaginings of widely known pop songs.
