With each stylistic mini-phase of Baltimore-born, Atlanta-based artist quinn’s career to date, she’s changed the rules of operation. The pioneering hyperpop she released in the late 2010s under a head-spinning number of aliases; the transmissions that—along with those of Jane Remover, Dazegxd, and others—created the digicore subgenre earlier this decade; the introspective innovations of her first two LPs, 2021’s drive-by lullabies and 2022’s quinn; and a multitude of album-length idea dumps and bite-sized collabs are drastically different but unmistakably hers. Her December mixtape, stars fell on trench, feels less immediately revolutionary than her earlier records. After five years spent exploding and rebuilding her signature sound, quinn’s vocabulary is more familiar than it once was: The music isn’t any less radical, but there’s more context for it now.
stars fell on trench is a collage of clashing samples and bars that alternate between razor sharp and deep fried. On opening track “terms and conditions,” a gospel choir gives way to layered, pitched-down samples of Bernie Sanders, which fade slowly as the hook of Project Pat’s “Out There” steps into the spotlight. Pat’s pitched-up voice continues to loop quietly as quinn’s enters, at once animatronic and oddly warm. Far-flung as these sounds are, they feel natural together, like she’s lived in them for a while. “I could never fade away, won’t settle till I’m 30,” she raps from a cozy pocket in the now-settled instrumental.
Later on, quinn samples Usher’s “U Got It Bad,” Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” One Direction’s “Night Changes,” Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” and Snoop Dogg’s diatribe from “The Chronic (Intro),” among other, less immediately apparent sources. Using clips so recognizable they transcend sample-snitching may be trendy, but quinn slaps her raw materials together at odd angles no one could replicate. Her voice slides below and above them in the mix, at home in the misshaped creases.
stars fell on trench has a few holes: A blown-out trap flip of a cloying emo-pop tune on “it’s nothing” strikes the wrong balance between dissonance and shlock. The repetitive Cranberries sample on “zombie” is far less inventive than the rest of the record’s production. But these misses are outnumbered by the tape’s many inspired moments—a chaotic mid-album track based around a Latin TikTok remix of Playboi Carti’s “2024” or a reimagining of beabadoobee’s “1999” as a willowy harmonic component of a heart-racing, sidescrolling instrumental.
