Halfway through 3x6x𐕣=666, 3x1x𐕣=111, 3x7x𐕣=777, 3x5x𐕣=555, 3x9x𐕣=999, 3x3x𐕣=333 (also referred to as Mathematics), the new album from Des Moines, Iowa rapper Teller Bank$, two of his friends die. Put more accurately, Teller relives those deaths, suddenly accosted by their memories within the span of four bars. “I only got one dead friend,” he begins, then corrects himself: “I only got two dead friends.” Like so many other things in his writing—the ambient threat of danger, the lingering effects of substance abuse, the psychic toll of enacting violence—they are unique moments woven into an infinite tapestry, stripped of the markers of time until they’re nothing more than a throbbing, persistent feeling. The stories in Teller’s songs rarely feel linear but always feel present, as if each new thought is a detonation forced by some unseen tripwire. His voice, rubberbanding from a high-pitched yowl to a despondent sigh, conveys the mountain of energy it takes to document these fleeting echoes.
He’s put that ability to contort his voice and delivery to mesmerizing use throughout his rich catalog, leaning on his roots as a jazz musician to find pockets in every kind of beat. Teller’s love and understanding of rap mechanics are bone deep, so he’s just as comfortable nestling into ratcheting trap hi-hats as he is bobbing and weaving around a golden-age boom-bap pattern. On “George & Javks,” a headspinning highlight from Hate Island, his first album of 2026, he skates across the self-destructing house beat, voice gnarled by Auto-Tune into an uncanny, slithering texture. The beats on that record, supplied by $$$, an ever-expanding production crew based in Philadelphia, shift under his feet like desert sand. For Mathematics, Teller enlists Six†een, one of the crew’s linchpins, for the lion’s share of production. Six also comes from a jazz background (she, $$$ member Q No Rap Name, and her brother Chop the Head—who drew the art for Mathematics—make up Philly “trunk jazz” trio You’re All Cowards), and seems just as interested as Teller is in bending sound into new shapes. Together, they’ve created a dense, experimental record that feels like a mind ripping apart at the seams.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Six’s tracks never sit still, constantly morphing like a game of telephone. “I’m Better,” which begins like a skipping LaserDisc of a classic rock concert film, slowly solidifies into the brittle ghost of Southern funk, mechanized hi-hats wading through delay to staple together flickering vocal samples. On “Trigger Warning: Suicide,” she routes a fidgety, shimmering drone through massive plodding drums, landing somewhere between Bowery Electric downtempo and phantasmal vaporwave. Like many songs on the album, it ends in a flurry of noise, finally making good on the promise to completely disintegrate. Even the more straight-ahead cuts feature strange, disarming elements, like the tinnitus melody that hovers over the jazz guitar drag of “Dirt,” or the stabs of what sounds like a melting trombone during the sultry, Sade-esque cooing on “One Too Many.” Each listen brings a new layer to the fore as some previously harsh arrhythmia locks into place.
