In the 2000s, there was an extremely popular manga called Nana, where nothing all that important happened. It was a melancholic comedy about two new friends in their early twenties, both named Nana. They spend most of their time in Tokyo hanging out at bars, rocking Vivienne Westwood, working jobs, playing music, and balancing on and off romantic relationships. It was a detailed and messy character study that felt like falling in deeper with a friend group with every new issue.
I sometimes get a similar feeling when I listen to the new-age cloud rap of Dolo2000. The Southern California rapper and producer has been dropping casually dreamy tapes and loosies full of fragmented everyday situations—hitting parlays with his friends, smoking weed, going to shows—like a Curren$y raised on SoundCloud. His new album, Let’s Meet At Junes, continues to open up his world with foggy scenes that capture a snapshot of being young, fly, and a little aimless in Los Angeles.
A lot of Dolo’s vignettes on Let’s Meet At Junes drift from bad dates to empty hookups to getting drunk at parties while carrying a general sense of malaise. With a lowkey sing-rap usually caked in various kinds of effects, only some of the lyrics are super clear, but the ones that do cut through form images so sharp it’s almost like you’re there. On the standout “at_the_club_its_so_meaningless,” with his melodies only lightly warped, he describes a night out of going through the motions. “Kinda sad that I see you less,” he says, longing for someone, which, combined with the spacey beat, makes you picture him sitting alone at the bar of a loud club while his friends go out and mack on the dancefloor. The vocal effects of “secretlab” are a lot heavier, with overlapping smothered ad-libs like a Black Kray record from a decade ago, making the loose crumbs on his mind (his Undercover sweater, letting go of a relationship) sound surreal.
The songs that don’t work are the ones where the lyrics come off as one long blur. For example, his vocals on “kanji’s castle” are overly blunted, an effect I’m not usually against, but it’s unstylish, like a pilot’s announcement from the cockpit. (Though I do get a kick out of how plainly he disses retired NBA loudmouth Kendrick Perkins—get his ass.) “break no promise xoxo” is the album’s most cliché track, marked by undercooked dating talk and murmurs of “percocet and lean” that feel straight out of one of those Duwap Kaine deep cuts you pretend don’t exist. The beat picks up the emotional slack, though, with a Friendzone-ish glassiness that hammers home the soul-searching. By and large, Dolo’s mostly self-produced instrumentals— which resemble everything from the etherealness of Japanese RPG video games of the 2000s (Persona 4, specifically) to the electronic funk of Metro Zu—go a long way in setting the figuring-his-shit-out mood.
But it’s the small moments that really make Let’s Meet At Junes feel so lived-in. Killing time playing his favorite Call of Duty map on the plugg-coated “gaspack.” The scraps of dialogue sprinkled throughout “guancho guancho man,” where Dolo’s melodies are basically chipmunk’d. And the most scenic of them all is “still_the_same,” a glimpse at the slow fade out of a relationship. Going from communication issues to a breakup to Dolo making the bad decision to hit her up after-party only to realize that nothing has changed, it’s brought to life by raps that amplify the confusion and the jittery footwork bounce of the beat. Like a lot of his best music, it could be an entire chapter in a graphic novel of its own.
