The black van shudders with bass thuds in the tunnel. We’re 100 feet under the Hudson River and I’m getting an unofficial private listening session of unreleased music. OsamaSon’s spinning songs I haven’t even seen in snippet form, the kind of stuff the rapper’s desperate leakers would drool over. The smell of weed fills the air as a psycho beat that could be used as cruel and unusual punishment for 45-year-olds fires out of the speakers; another banger starts with a newscaster sample that’s a little on the nose, especially since we just left the Pitchfork office in the World Trade Center: CNN says Osama bin Laden’s son has been killed!
We hop out in Carroll Gardens, on a sunny street packed with parents pushing strollers. Inside a colorful soda fountain, decked out with retrobait diner-counter stools and garish showtunes blasting, we go dumbo: two cookies & cream milkshakes, a coke, hot chocolate dripping in s’mores ingredients, and a warm brownie sundae. OsamaSon got no sleep yesterday because of construction buzzing outside his hotel, so he really needed the sugar high.
He’s currently riding another high: The release of Jump Out, his first album to crack the Billboard Top 200. He surprise-dropped it early after the entire project was leaked in late January. The album is so intricate it feels like getting lost in the datacombs, every track a cave system of layered effects and mutant melodies. So hectic and hyper it makes Pi’erre Bourne beats sound like they’re in half-time, Jump Out is the kind of record that rewires the way your brain processes info. Highlight “Ref” pushes rap closer to pure noise, an acid haze that washes away worries and caresses dopamine centers. But it’s also clearly indebted to rap history; buried inside the din, sampled burbles of Future’s 2015 track “I Serve the Base” can be made out.
This mad rap is the product of a 21-year-old who, as a kid, was obsessed with the euphoric bile of Skrillex and bass-boosted edits. “I used to try every single way you could bass boost your shit,” he says. “I’m addicted to how it sounds.” He works with beatmakers like wegonebeok, LEGION, and gyro who deploy 808s as a kind of mutant fuzz pedal. (It dunks on most modern-day shoegazers churning out noisy MBV-core.) This is rap-as-snow-squall, a swooning carnage that makes the young, rabid fans at his shows shake like they’re being electro-shocked. OsamaSon tells me his health insurance provider said they wouldn’t cover him if he kept stage diving.
