Underground rap heads either love LAZER DIM 700’s serrated freestyles or say he epitomizes the genre’s deterioration into clickbait meme music. The Atlantan was the most abrasive rookie of 2024, toting a style midway between zoinked party music and air-raid sirens. He spits in an extremes-of-consciousness flow, cracking songs open with a torrent of expletives before launching into verses that are basically just one long, leapfrogging hook, like he’s trying to speedrun to the two-minute mark. It’s a world of za, zot, fawks, fine shyts, wigging and wigan out, buckshots, buck-downs, and bust-downs. He records everything on the phone app BandLab, so the mixing is nonexistent.
But underneath the viral spectacle is just a young man from the small town of Cordele, Georgia, who idolized Lil Wayne as a kid and got into making rap in the second grade, when his mother’s boyfriend would set up makeshift studios in their house. LAZER DIM 700’s entire come-up has been serendipitous: He met his early producer-partner Goxan in the comment section of a YouTube type beat; he created his first viral hit, “Asian rock,” on PlaqueBoyMax’s Twitch stream Song Wars, over a random beat he found on YouTube. His best songs catch lightning in a vial, 90-second snippets of comedy and chaos rooted in ephemeral, absurdist moments. They electrify but also make you wonder how different they might sound if he’d recorded them at another time, with other arbitrary thoughts swirling in his scrambled brain.
KEEPIN IT CLOUDY could soundtrack a haunted hayride where a distorted dark-plugg 808 effect shadows every scare, the actors are costumed like “Swiss cheese” opps, and weed smoke casts an impenetrable pall. This is LAZER’s debut studio album, which would suggest a level up: more time spent, higher production values. But instead of thrashing out to new ground, the album mostly sounds like LAZER on cruise control—and it loses some of the janky insanity that made his early music so thrilling.
You can blame some of that dulled spark on the cleaner mixing, which takes away the earlier music’s scrappy, sickly thrill, when the songs felt perpetually on the verge of collapse. But it’s also because LAZER’s voice has a sedate, weathered edge, like he recorded the album after running a mile personal best. To quote “KEEPIN IT CLOUDY,” he often sounds like the za has sent him into orbit. Goxan and Skello’s bass spasms like it’s speaking in vibrational braille on “MILITANT,” practically swallowing up LAZER’s arrhythmic flow. “FAST & FURIOUS” smacks like any number of dark plugg tunes from the last couple of years; LAZER soft-talks like he’s trying to calm Ark and mahxlxtl’s beat down from a temper tantrum.
