First Impressions: JPEGMAFIA’s ‘Experimental Rap’ Is Elegant, But Familiar Chaos
While social media has been having a dunk contest at his expense, JPEGMAFIA’s latest album is solid on the first few listens.
JPEGMAFIA’s latest album is called Experimental Rap, but like most of his projects, it really sounds like a manic episode. And I mean that in a good way.
Released yesterday, the 25-track new LP is a nervy mosaic of eclectic sounds and twitchy raps, and curated chaos. In that way, it’s not too much different from most of Peggy’s catalog, but there’s a steady injection of Skrillex synths that make it all feel a bit more unwieldy — in a controlled way.
Here, JPEG’s raps are as acrobatic as ever — or maybe a little more so. His imagination is just as kinetic. For “babygirl,” he threads a Black Eyed Peas interpolation with a clandestine soundscape that unfolds into hard rock by the end of it all. He laces it with couplets that are nearly as sprightly as they are genuinely clever: “Pistols and choppas with drums at my residence/Switches on blicks, make you one with the elements/Draco take you out your body like Severance.”
JPEG’s raps are athletic throughout the LP, and I think he’s pretty funny, but mixing and matching of genres is really what keeps me locked in. He’ll go from spitting over the same classic Brenda Russell sample Big Pun used (“Pop This Heat”) to turning Kanye’s “All of the Lights” horn into something dystopian, holy, and somehow also hellish (“Lights”). It’s all pretty fun, even if it might be better at 45 minutes instead of 52.
Across X (formerly known as Twitter), folks have been coming at JPEGMAFIA because, well, X is a terrible place, and two, because he pretty much made himself head of the Experimental Rapper Club when he called Earl Sweatshirt for, in his mind, not being experimental enough. They traded some disses on social media, but it didn’t go further than that. I don’t think Peggy is as good as Earl, but for what it’s worth, through a couple of listens, this LP was easier to absorb than Earl, MIKE, and Surf Gang’s Pompeii // Utility. The varied sounds and Peggy’s abrasive weirdness are easier to engage with than the monotonously foggy production of the Earl and MIKE tape (which is still pretty good).
Still, he called Earl out for allegedly making the same song with The Alchemist over and over again, but in some ways, he’s also making a lot of the same stuff he made before. At least, at the root. The kineticism and the randomness of his pop culture references remain the same and he’s always worked with sprawling influences. People on X are calling out the Skrillex-adjacent elements, but at least it’s something kind of novel for Peggy. And, I’m sure I’ll pick up on more elements from the album in the near future. But, in general, there’s a lot to like on the new LP. And even if there isn’t all that much experimentation, it’s cool. The truth is, oftentimes, even something like "experimental" becomes more of an adjective than an active approach. Sometimes, it’s okay not to play around too much with the formula.
Check out Peggy’s new LP for yourself below.
