In a world where plenty of rap elders are content to roll out unchallenging albums to steadfast fanbases, Roc Marciano still knows how to hold your head underwater. Few rappers boast a style so enveloping and detail-rich, every verse stuffed with taunts, velour victories, and nagging regrets rendered in granular, Gordon Parks-like radiance. New albums from Hempstead’s veteran rapper-producer unfold like dispatches from a jet-setting uncle popping in for a visit: His tales scan as ridiculous, even a bit silly, but that just makes them more thrilling. He brings the same watchful eye to the loops he raps over as he does to the Patek on his wrist or the shiesty goons “fertilized with horse poo” for botching a hit, all (mostly) without spinning his wheels. After some high-profile collaborations, he’s back behind the mic and the MPC for 656, his new studio album, which pushes into the sweet spot between the analog and the digital.
It’s the first album he’s fully produced for himself since 2013’s Marci Beaucoup, and doesn’t stray far from his patented bare-bones chops and loops. Presentation is the biggest difference here: Many of these songs have an electronic sheen to them, the type of haze associated with an unprocessed beat ripped straight from the machine it was made on. Instead of sounding rushed or cheap, it adds an extra layer of menace to Marci’s gaudy underworld. The organ, drum fill, and scant horn line on opener “Trick Bag” march with a distorted crunch; the synths powering “Childish Things” sound sourced from some long-lost Super Mario 64 Bowser dungeon. Other flourishes feel lightly touched up, tweaked until they’re slightly lopsided: Take the bass strums on “Prince & Apollonia,” so fuzzy they land like percussion, or the subtle robotic metronome leading the swelling arrangement of “Yves St. Moron.” This is a different shade of minimalism for Marci, harkening to the gutter ’90s-era beatmaking represented by the dingy floppy disk on the album cover.
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A good chunk of the album bears these synthetic seams, but the rest further refines the diamond-cut aesthetic and elastic rhyme schemes Marci’s made his name on since the early 2010s. “I’m not an actor, but I’m in character,” he says near the beginning of “Hate Is Love,” keeping it real while continuing to blur fact and fiction. Mise-en-scène remains crucial to maintaining the grandiosity of the Marci experience—his reference pool and peerless lifestyle raps simultaneously enhance each other. When he drops an “Ain’t no Tracee Ellis Rosses up at Ross” in between luxury colognes and cars on “Vanity,” the zinger juxtaposes the Girlfriends star with a hapless chad attempting to “trauma bond, crying inside the Prada store.” The point: Shop wherever you want—it may be on you, but it’s in him. What the late Ka did to build resolve against the unforgiving brutalities of Brownsville, Marci combines with the flair of a Bond villain and contempt for anyone attempting to copy his mold.
