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.

Payroll Giovanni — Ghost Mode

Just a few minutes into Ghost Mode, the new album by the celebrated Detroit veteran Payroll Giovanni, comes a brief verse from Jeezy, so crisply mixed that at first you mistake it for the song’s hook. It’s de rigueur Jeezy—“Birds touch down, I ain’t talking ‘bout a flight”—from the first-thought references (to Trae Young, to Barry White) to the grand, bricks-to-billboards arc it traces (“I was talking shit with Obama just the other day”). It’s not surprising to see Jeezy’s name pop up on this tracklist: a decade ago, he signed Payroll’s group, Doughboyz Cashout, who were breakout stars locally and online for their wrangling of gaudily maximal production and for folding dense R&B samples into sly street raps, to his Corporate Thugz Entertainment. While the deal did not yield any releases that broke Doughboyz nationally, the pair have stayed in one another’s orbit.

While it’s nice to see an ill-fated business venture take a backseat to mutual admiration, the artists could not be more different. In Jeezy’s songs the stakes are always maxed out—hence Obama, hence everything—while in Payroll’s the margins are narrower. (Not for him, mind you, but he’ll still rub shoulders with non-millionaires.) And where Jeezy’s personal trainer/drill sergeant/motivational speaker exhortations long ago settled into a kind of pleasant din, Payroll’s agitation has bubbled ever closer to the surface. Though the production he favors sounds supremely relaxed, he frequently feels anything but.

Most of Ghost Mode finds Payroll dispensing advice about how to insulate yourself until you’re ready to disappear. He urges his young friends to wear his chains and invest their money; brags about his own spending frequently, but always through the lens of how sustainable he’s made his life. Sometimes this consumption is attached to a code of ethics (he decides certain rappers are lying in their coke tales based on the cheap watches on the wrists of their wives), sometimes it’s gleefully straightforward (“The only thing finished is the marble in the crib”). No matter what, it sounds like the sort of mantra one mutters to himself to calm nerves that are threatening to run out of control.

This tension between poise and paranoia is best captured not in any single line of Payroll’s, but in the beat for “Existence,” his collaboration with the burgeoning Detroit rapper Babyface Ray. The textures are soft and the keys major, but the low end is just a little too loud, and the bounce—borrowed from the more transparently digital songs that have dominated Michigan’s off-kilter rap scene so far this decade—is quick and threatening to quicken, a heartbeat on the verge of a crisis, a mall collapsing in on itself.

Wacotron — “Early Bird”

Wacotron has hovered frustratingly below national radars despite pumping out, for the past couple of years, some of the most durably swaggering raps in Texas—no easy feat. (Some committed rap fans have taken notice: Last year Byron Buxton, the superstar center fielder for the Minnesota Twins, picked “Cut Me Up” as his walkup music, likely the most obscure song used for that purpose in all of baseball.) What makes him compelling is his ability to merge musical lineages from his home state and around the South—he sometimes lapses into a vocal tone that recalls Baton Rouge’s Kevin Gates—with the freewheeling pace and energy of drill music, which is likely why Chicago’s G Herbo tapped him as an artist to watch two years ago. “Early Bird” is an ideal distillation of that ungovernable energy, seeming to unfold in two, three, a half-dozen different directions without ever stopping to recompose itself.

Payroll Giovanni & Wacotron: First & Fifteenth