For ‘Sock It 2 My Pocket,’ Rome Streetz Writes Street Raps in Neon Chalk

Self-descriptions can be a lame, empty adventure, but Rome Streetz serves up some cool ones on “'95 Mega On Shrooms.” Skittering through a beat that sounds like a haunted trash compactor, he manages to thread an immediate succession of ostentatious self-pats-on-the-back before landing on a comparison to an underrated NY legend — if he decided to use psychedelics: “I used to bag it by eye then got a measuring spoon/I rap like '95 Cormega on 'shrooms.” It’s as acrobatic as it is accurate. To date, Rome’s made a career out of writing first-person street narratives in molten crayon. It’s a tradition he continues on Sock It 2 My Pocket, a new album he renders with idiosyncratic bars and shapeshifting production to match them. 

Over the course of 43 minutes, Rome distills slick talk and hard-learned lessons over disembodied jazz (“Yellow Brick Road”), psychedelia (“Time & Place” with IDK) and simmering soul (“Elevate”). Regardless of context, Rome fills those symbiotic spaces with a neon imagination and flows that jumping jack and slither and levitate. Floating through a bed of latin flutes for “High Speed,” Rome raps like a jewel thief who just made his great escape from the jungle. Spitting over the drowsy horns of “Cocaine Coltrane,” he unloads pop culture references that are unorthodox as they are precisely rhymed: “All your shit is contrived, this wise guy's a natural/I'm Illmatic, Nas, tryna dodge the devil's lasso/Kickin' science, I should rock a lab coat/You never had the ism/Attract money, I got magnetism, mass division/Black magic when I rap the rhythms/Nightmare like Black Sabbath, plenty savage in him.”

Unlike a lot of other drug raps, Rome’s playful, associative writing, along with the beats he chooses, keep things from becoming trite. With electric guitar licks peeking out of the eerie vocal sample like sunshine from behind the clouds, the soundscape for “Yellow Brick Road” feels like Rome’s actually traveling the Yellow Brick Road. Except instead of being “off to see the wizard,” he’s off to see the plug. Teaming up with IDK for “Time & Place,” he spits over a beat that sounds like he’s on the type of drugs that will make you forget the time and place — except his sprightly flow and quirky punchlines require too much focus for that to be true. “Can't get off all that I'm involved in/Still goin' up, I'm evolvin'/We ain't the same, I'm a martian/Like Lil Wayne and Marvin,” he raps, with his casually controlled syllables, mellow vocal tone and hidden-in-plain-sight one-liners spilling out like a Food & Liquor-era Lupe. 

Listening to Rome’s latest project, his contemporaries, and just about everything else in his catalog, I’m impressed with his progress as both a songwriter and aesthete — even if lines like “you n—s ass like colon cancer” should’ve been left in his iPhone notes. It would have been easy for him to become a typical post-2010s example of classical street rap reborn, but he swirls different elements to make something uniquely him. I see some of Westside Gun’s aesthetic precision, Conway The Machine’s rhyme precision and, most importantly, his own subtly eccentric character at work at all times. And I definitely get the ’95 Cormega comparison. But I’ll just say it’s 2026 Rome Streetz on Sock It 2 My Pocket.