With a series of delineations with which to approach sung vocals and rapped lyricism, Smino delivers nothing but tracks that are broken down to explosive quips, quick wordplay, short stories, and attention deficit disorder in its most poetic of forms. Forget every track on NOIR, every single verse, bridge, and chorus is a complicated, shuffling exhibition of Smino’s permanently unsettled approach to his own musicality. Each is a story, and each is a multi-part composition that shifts at an elementally musical scale as it does as a tale.Īnd that’s all thanks to, once again, Smino’s vocal delivery. He has seemingly mastered the approach of disallowing a track to be simply so. Beginning with the production of his talented compositional crew, Zero Fatigue, and headed by the genius of Monte Booker, bolstered by a similar collection of talented friends and collaborators as his debut, and ending with the bold exclamation point of Smino’s ever-adjusting delivery, NOIR is a wild ride. Like blkswn, NOIR is a marathon album, though its 18 tracks and 58-minute run-time are better described as a lengthy Lou-Chi fairytale. Now, his sophomore album, NOIR, is here, and Smino once again finds himself at the pinnacle of hip-hop’s grandest stage, having arrived being the most inventive, most creative artist in his field. In the wild lawlessness that followed his debut’s release, Smino became more myth than man and continued his vibrant takeover of music, featuring on a slew of projects and releasing more of his own.
When his debut album, blkswn was released last year, it changed music, bringing the brashness of jazz, the unregistered grey area of post-genrefication, and the notion that maybe – just maybe – the most individualistic and innovative artists of the world were starting to be held at higher regard than those simply chasing something already done and mastered.įast forward to today and the world of music has become increasingly inventive, obscured by uncategorical stylings and indescribable cadence shifts across the board, stemming from hip-hop’s modern prominence, and at its core, Smino and blkswn’s one-of-a-kind direction.
A one-man collective of hyper-experimentalism in hip-hop and R&B merging with the conceptual vocab of history’s greatest songwriters, Smino is indefinable on every scale. Hip-hop’s Bob Dylan, he sounds like no one ever has and is too bizarrely poetic for anyone to ever imitate. His style is ultimately inventive, endlessly wandering, vibrantly indecisive, schizophrenically genial, and patterned beyond sense. No vocalist has ever been more creative than Smino.
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