On his new album co-produced with Nedarb, the LA-based artist pushes himself further than he’s ever gone.
Slug Christ, for better or for worse, is an experimenter. He has quietly been picking apart rap music for nearly a decade, inserting disparate influences into cloud rap and post-Lil B improvisations. Much of this has been alongside buddies and collaborators from Awful Records, a group with a reputation as genre-pushing weirdos with tendrils throughout the underground. While Awful can get weird, select moments of Slug Christ’s discography make Father sound like Quavo.
This is not necessarily a quality judgement, as not all of Slugga’s creative outings have been resounding successes. At times, it felt like he didn’t even want to be a rapper; in certain interviews, he expressed a desire to not be boxed in by genre. With these feelings bubbling under the surface, it was only a matter of time before Slug released something like DEEP (un)LEARNING, a project that feels creatively free without denying any of his musical interests.
The ethos of DEEP (un)LEARNING is something Slug Christ seems determined to make clear: on Soundcloud, it’s tagged as an ambient release with a paragraph-long description about abandoning the confines of genre. Of course, none of this is necessary, as you’ll get halfway through the album before encountering any vocal delivery that sounds like rapping. The first track, “Wolves“, makes Slug Christ’s new direction very clear. It’s spacey and slow, with the first half of the song featuring no drums at all, carrying itself with extended instrumental passages of synths and piano. It reaches a climax with a hopelessly slow marching beat as Slug Christ cries out in pain: “now I find myself covered in blood.”
Overall, this new style fits Slug’s voice more than any other. At times, his rap delivery has felt grating and never quite matched the traumatic content he was talking about; here, we get a full range of Slug emotions, from abject sadness to unending pain. “Cherry Blossom (Sound of Staying)” is one of his finest vocal performances ever, as well as an obvious highlight of the project. The verses find him channeling your favorite pop-punk singer, which is great, but the true jaw-drop moment is the chorus, where Slug pushes his voice to the point of breaking.
This delivery feels like a much more honest vessel for him, and the lyrics seem to follow in terms of honesty. While we get some relatively basic assertions of sadness and despair, there are also moments of self-reflection. He seems to acknowledge his shortcomings in dealing with other’s emotional instability in the aforementioned Cherry Blossom by responding to a suicidal call for help with “that’s my line, and you know it.” In Eulogy, he tells us that he can’t relate to another person before quickly admitting that it’s his own fault. Slug Christ is certainly as sad as ever, but it feels deeper here, something that the listener can feel rather than just hear about.
Of course, this feeling of true sadness only works so well because of the impressive co-production from Nedarb. A frequent GOTHBOICLIQUE producer, he shows off his versatility by pivoting from the expected Lil Peep-emo on “I Don’t Deserve This Heaven” to ambient drone on the beginning of “Deep Unlearning“. The abandonment of more traditional structure does not always work, however, with some tracks like 27 Years of Pain ending up feeling a bit like a blurry wash of synth pads soaked in reverb.
Despite this, Nedarb’s co-production lends Slug Christ something his previous projects have missed: cohesiveness. DEEP (un)LEARNING feels like a complete artistic statement. While the sounds themselves may not be quite as revolutionary as the Soundcloud description hypes them up to be, it feels like Slug Christ has found a way to express himself without the limitations of typical rap conventions, while at the same time not fully abandoning the genre which brought him popularity. That, to me, makes this one of his experiments a success.