Listening to LAZER DIM 700 in album format feels a bit like stopping a comedian during his set and asking him to explain why his jokes are funny. Since the 23-year-old Atlanta rapper fine-tuned his Roadrunner-on-lean style about a year and a half ago, his work has come out in a constant stream of abbreviated songs, which are buoyed in the algorithm by his outlandish comic persona and constant online presence. To break this output into discrete units seems at best beside the point and at worst antithetical to the larger, brain-scrambling project.
When listening to Lazer, I often think of his claim that when he started rapping, he would do so while holding a cell phone in each hand: one to play the beat, the other to record that beat and his rapping. This evokes the DIY resourcefulness that has always been core to hip-hop, sure. But it’s also something more distinctly modern, and more than a little unsettling—the idea of the human as a conduit between different modems, his thoughts informed and metabolized by the internet in a perfect loop.
Sins Aloud, Lazer’s second album—though the distinction between it and the preceding mixtapes is, again, arbitrary—opens oddly for him, with prodbydrg’s velvet-soft “Feel Like 2016.” This is the kind of record that would be a welcome change of pace if you stumbled onto it after an hour of being bludgeoned by Lazer’s usual, white-hot fare. But its sequencing here reminded me of how, a decade ago, Young Thug opened Barter 6 with “Constantly Hating.” This was another ascendant, idiosyncratic Atlanta rapper who, in the normal rhythm of rap careers, was expected to make his Big Statement Album; in both cases, the star-in-waiting wrongfoots the listener, and in doing so exhibits control over the mood, the stakes, his career.
While Lazer has cultivated the air of an irreverent scamp who could care less about that sort of lineage, it’s instructive to remember that before the end of 2023, his music fit much more squarely into Atlanta traditions. As late as that year’s hot streak, his projects were essentially updates on Brick Squad tapes from the late 2000s and early 2010s. His vocals were already unmixed, evidently hasty BandLab recordings, but his delivery was slower and voice deeper, his taste in beats inflected with contemporary plugg but still defaulting to gothic, post-Lex Luger maximalism. That sensibility finds its way onto Sins Aloud: “Feel Like 2016” gives way to Smokkestaxkk and Simani’s “Sins,” where instrumentation that could have fit on one of those pre-prison Gucci mixtapes is undergirded by drum programming that could only come in the long, many-times-mutated wake of drill.
