Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon starts As of Now by paraphrasing a meme. “OK, I’m posted at the function in the corner, and they don’t even know,” he raps, his helium-tinged voice scooting through a flute sample. He pauses slightly, aware that a well-placed space in a sentence can seismically shift its impact: “…what I’m ’bout to do/I ask my boo, ‘Can we keep it low?’” Once you catch the cleverness of his comedic timing (they definitely know what he’s about to do), you should run the track back and listen for the preceding adlib, pushed low in the mix like a mischievous secret: “Watch this.”
You can almost see the glint in his eye as he unspools the rest of his soliloquy, oscillating between bleak details of threadbare pillows on trap house floors and shoulder-brushing flexes of cross-country flights and celebrity green rooms. When the beat switches, replacing the paisley jazz loop with a pulverized breakbeat and keyboard, it’s like an abrupt shift in lighting, shadows covering places you didn’t know could go dark. Jah-Monte’s casual delivery doesn’t change, but it suddenly feels deadly serious. When the hook comes back around, he’s still posted in that corner, this time rubbing his hands together like a Birdman reaction gif. The song sets up the impish opposition at play throughout As of Now, where Jah-Monte tempers vignettes of heartbreak and hustling with an amiable, absurdist wit.
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Jah-Monte’s been releasing music for just over a decade, but in the dozen or so releases since 2019’s Jewelry Rap, the Charlotte rapper has really hit his stride. His uniquely disarming sense of humor augments—and sometimes masks—the complexity of his taste and technical ability. In shakier hands, his output—like 2021’s Navy Blue-produced Beautifully Black or his 2023 collaboration with Sadhugold, The Black Messiah—might be lumped into the glut of solid, slightly stoned underground records that disappear as soon as the needle lifts. Instead, they’re immediately approachable but simultaneously layered and rewarding listens, full of subtle one-liners and detailed stories, incisive as they are droll.
As of Now is the height of Jah-Monte’s ability. A line like “Outside while you working remote” from “Instagram Highlights” establishes his bona fides and elicits a chuckle in a matter of seconds; when he casually drops, “I had run off on my plug, he was chasing me with a Glock” on “Butter Leather Weather,” it feels good-natured and funny despite what he’s describing. He stitches tracks together with interstitial moments that foreground the fun of the record, like interludes featuring the voice of a woman named Milly, who appears several times to declare it “the best album ever.” The skit that ends the album, “Lord Jah-Monte’s #1 Supporter,” is a compilation of voicemails presumably left by an obsessed hater, spinning up creative ways to call Jah-Monte a bitch. It’s bizarre and ridiculous, a bit of finishing salt to the record’s dueling vibes of “aw shucks” and “don’t fuck with me.”
