No Frills Reviews

The New Jersey experimental hip-hop duo deliver more disturbing dispatches from the dark depths of the human psyche

You’re probably not gonna hear the music of Fatboi Sharif on a major editorial playlist or going viral on TikTok. Nonetheless, it feels like he’s built a reputation as an in-demand star over the past few years. At least in the circles of a certain strand of underground hip-hop. With a prolific streak of features, including stablemates of Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade and Billy Woods’ Backwoodz Studioz. He appears like a mythic force of nature, a cult of personality that inevitably steals any scene he’s in. The New Jersey native is ostensibly a rapper, but it feels wholly inadequate to pigeonhole him with any typical genre descriptors.

That’s not to discount his rapping. With the erratic charisma of ODB and the occasional hint of Big Pun in his cadence; Sharif can rap. He proves it here, on Battlestar Galactica, where he adopts something closer to a conventional flow in his rhymes. But he isn’t really concerned with the conventional. It’s often less rap, and more spoken word – minus the tedious insufferability of spoken word. Instead, he’s more likely to distort or slow his vocal delivery to a pained, ghoulish crawl. Shafir is a true experimentalist; a man dealing in the unknown, a man in search of the new.

From the album’s opening moments, when a stuttering beat morphs into a murky dirge, it signals to always expect the unexpected. There’s very little in the way of typical song structures across the album’s 16 tracks. You might say there’s a lot of beat switches, but even the word ‘beat’ doesn’t feel quite right. These sound like flickering holograms collapsing in on themselves, only to be replaced by transmissions shot in from another dimension. This is a collage of sounds, more than a collection of songs.

Sharif is backed up on Let Me Out by one of his frequent collaborators, Driveby. The New Jersey producer has also emerged as a notable name on the experimental rap scene in the past few years, most recently delivering a kind of warped R&B on 2024’s impressive, A Carfull, with Wavy Bagels. The scope of sounds he conjures up here goes far beyond hip-hop, often barely recognisable as conforming to any particular genre; they’re twisted, mangled forms of something that once was. There’s eerie, ambient drones, and abstract jazz, which is … even more abstract. But he also provides flashes of surprisingly sweet soul loops; brief moments of comfort amidst the madness.

This is really the only appropriate canvas for Sharif to sketch out his visions. The paradox of Sharif’s lyrical style is that he’s both vividly descriptive, yet largely indecipherable. His words seemingly reflect something otherworldly; they’re borne of post-apocalyptic and sci-fi signifiers. Yet, if you pay attention, these are bizarrely grim scenes that could very much be borne from our reality – “bestiality at the Fyre Festival”. A name check in one song title feels like a particularly relevant reference point – Basquiat. The spirit of Sharif’s work lies in expressionism; his use of harsh, hauntingly evocative imagery capturing life’s absurd horrors.

Trying to truly understand a Fatboi Sharif project feels somewhat futile. But to borrow a a quote from Will Ferrell (and a formerly great innovator of a more conventional form of hip-hop) – “No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.” Sharif’s music isn’t catchy, it’s not easy to comprehend, it’s not a particularly pleasant experience, yet it always feels like you’re witnessing something utterly compelling and magnetic. Sometimes you just have to appreciate an artist at work; a surrealist philosopher reflecting the grotesque terror of our times.

Best tunes: Battlestar Galactica, Swim Team Audible Function, Elvira’s Wedding Ring, Basquiat Painted Transylvania (feat. Lungs)

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Let Me Out is available to purchase via Deathbomb Arc.

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