The gift of skaiwater’s best music is its unique shape, blown-out underground rap styles carefully folded into delicate origami. Forget every preconceived notion you might have about “rage rap” and put on “rain”—it’s so pretty, a butterfly fluttering around a bomb site. On that album, #gigi, skai harnessed beat drops like wrecking balls crashing into the walls of their heart. You felt every lovelorn Auto-Tune squiggle even as the bass shook your skull. There were countless moments of sudden retreat and explosive payoff, like the eerie calm before a tsunami. Genre experiments were a vessel for cascading feelings. And last year’s pinkPrint mixtapes pushed the envelope even further. Where else will you find a Nottingham rapper chipmunking a Mk.gee sample like prime Just Blaze?
At their most inventive, skaiwater is like if Rodeo-era Travis Scott and Playboi Carti had a baby. That’s why their new album, wonderful, leaves me a little cold. It rarely aspires for that inquisitive, Ye-brained alchemy, the kind that could only come from a forum kid with a bottomless appetite for music across the spectrum. There’s a lack of curiosity—and fun, really—on this record. Instead, skaiwater leans into rote rage rap tropes, verging on Carti parody. Most of these songs are fried, one-note, and tailored for Rolling Loud; either you’re in or you’re out.
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Me personally? I’m out. When I listen to songs like “STAR” and “IPHONE 5” off wonderful, my mind goes to the meticulous patchwork of vocal takes and ad-libs on REST IN BASS, Che’s redlining homage to Carti. On a formal level, it’s cool to hear skai weave together their clipped vocals so carefully—it’s like the rap version of watching a surgical combo in Competitive Smash. On a songwriting level, it doesn’t go anywhere. Skaiwater doesn’t have their signature arranger’s touch here; they sound like a copy of a copy.
I don’t know how many more boilerplate bass barrages I need to hear like “NITTY,” which basically cribs the melody of OsamaSon’s “Made Sum Plans,” and “VIRGO,” which is the gross kind of horny (“Her pussy taste like fent”). And on the blaring “DOG,” they enlist their new friend, Atlanta rapper Tezzus, whose verses so far have been like peak Russell Westbrook—either you’re getting a classic performance or a brick. This one is preposterously bad: “When we fuck, we havin’ sex!”
The urgency to turn everything up feels forced. It’s like someone (my money’s on Plaqueboymax) told skaiwater, “Make some shit for the moshpits!” It infects the small details, even skai’s new ad lib: this horrid squawk somewhere between BabyTron and Annoying Orange. I’m tired of how many people in this corner of Zoomer rap are trying to do different versions of the same thing, which is, quite simply, more. Getting louder, getting noisier, asking us to “train our ears.” Have you heard Dragnutz rapping over hardstyle, or Percatric rapping over a dog whistle?
