First & Fifteenth is a column by the Los Angeles-based critic Paul Thompson, who reviews new and notable rap music twice a month for Audiomack World.

Destroy Lonely — If Looks Could Kill

In contrast to the seemingly never-ending stream of young rappers who build a buzz in the press by convincing adults that they have the ears of teens, Destroy Lonely is a genuine rising star among those born in or after the W. Bush years. (Ironically, he’s the son of I-20, the Disturbing Tha Peace linchpin whose guest verses are a talisman of old-millennial debauchery.) He is, like so many artists to emerge this decade, born from Playboi Carti’s rib—he’s actually signed to Carti’s Opium imprint—and, like many of his peers, intrigued by high fashion and distorted guitars. The 21-year-old’s studio debut, If Looks Could Kill, does not argue for him as a generational talent. What it does do is map out the way conspicuous consumption—of codeine, of Rick Owens—can be made redemptive or corrosive through tiny tweaks to framing.

In fact, the album opens by head-faking in the direction of something genuinely moving. The first proper verse on “how u feel?” comes to a head with a near-panic attack about the contingent value he finds in the material. What is at first a boast about his wardrobe being perpetually ahead of looks stolen by his biters (“You can keep it/I don’t want it”) gives way to something more personal: “And I’d throw all this shit away if I can’t give it to none of my homies.”

Destroy Lonely’s voice is run through the digital mud a la Travis Scott or any number of his acolytes; this guarantees stylization but is seldom calibrated to enhance the melodic or emotional tenets of a song. And it, combined with a general stoicism, keeps tracks like “raver” from becoming the chanted expressions of pure id that so many Carti records can be. When he says that he feels as if he’s dying during an acid trip, the listener is forced to believe or not believe him, because they are certainly not yanked along for the ride.

Fortunately, this muddiness occasionally resolves into truer, more tantalizing ambiguity. On records like “all the time” and “promo,” an apparent uncertainty about tone and intensity makes Destroy Lonely scan as an expert in ambivalence. The effect is memorably hollow. It’s as if Carti’s Technicolor has been run three, four times through the washing machine, a symbol of a symbol of a symbol.

Veeze — “GOMD (Remix)” ft. Lil Uzi Vert

Translation is overrated. With Detroit, as with all rich regional scenes, there has been considerable hand-wringing from critics, fans, and especially industry types about which rapper will make the city’s idiosyncratic styles legible to a mass audience and consistently bankable for majors. This is despite the fact that the common denominator among Detroit styles that have cropped up over the past two decades—from Doughboyz Cashout’s strip club maximalism to their R&B flips, from Black Milk’s analog formalism to the most conversational scam rap from 10 years later—is the sense that they’ve been hermetically sealed from what’s happening at radio or in other markets.

Veeze, from the city’s west side, has become a minor internet phenomenon by resisting the urge to distill—by sprinting in the opposite direction, recording songs where his poise flirts with downright passivity and letting many of those songs languish as leaks which only burnish his cult status. Obscurity seems to be the point.

On the remix of “GOMD,” this laconicism of voice and worldview chafes wonderfully against Lil Uzi Vert’s urgency. Uzi is a tantalizing exception to the logic that yearns for a watered-down version of what was eccentric and exciting; he has pushed his influences to their logical extremes and spawned disparate, and occasionally experimental descendants. Here the equal opposites float through an instrumental that recalls luxurious gloss from the turn of the century that’s been fucked up just enough by digital dissemination.

Lil Uzi Vert

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