WILTLW: Jul 27, 2025
ZAYALLCAPS - art Pop * pop Art
LA-based ZAYALLCAPS returns with his third straight project dropped in July, a streak that brings to mind MIKE’s 5-year run of dropping projects on the summer solstice, but I digress. art Pop * pop Art is ZAY’s biggest left turn and also his greatest triumph. It's essentially a mid-aughts neo-r&b and g-funk record, the bones of which were present on his previous offerings but dressed in the style of Pierre Bourne digi-trap. While much praise has been heaped on the over-the-top horndoggery of lead single “Pimp My Ride,” it’s actually the sweet-hearted softness of album cuts like “Ode 2 Ivory” and “PROCESS” that make this album a joy to return to.
quinn - lowlife
quinn’s been on an incredible run these past few years, and it continues with lowlife, a 7-track project written, produced, mixed and mastered solely by her. True to its title, lowlife is the darkest of quinn’s recent offerings, she’s at wit’s end dealing with the zero-sum cynicism of today’s music industry, frequently fantasizing about getting out of the game entirely. The production runs the gamut from lo-fi soul loop samples to dub reggae club grooves to breakneck breakbeats that drop in off a Goodfellas sound bite. She skates on all of it of course, waxing poetic about illicit drug use, backstabbing peers and being more talented than you.
Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele
I first heard Ghostface Killah’s legendary Supreme Clientele playing ping-pong in my friend Emmett’s basement between the summers of eighth and ninth grade, but two things transpired this week that led me to revisit the record. The first was the announcement of Supreme Clientele 2, Ghostface’s oft-teased, quarter-of-a-century in the making follow-up to his magnum opus. The accompanying single, “Rap Kingpin,” is a rework of the original’s “Mighty Healthy” with an incredibly obnoxious whistle melody thrown on top of the beat. Ghost sounds older of course, his playful yap has grown huskier to the point of Funkmaster Flex territory over the last two decades, and the bars have a similar haggardness to them, flashing glimpses of vintage Ironman grit and bravura but missing the unhinged word association schemes that color his greatest works. Needless to say it didn’t inspire a ton of confidence about the upcoming record.
The other thing that happened last week was I finished Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It took me about 4 months to work through and was a struggle the whole way, at times enjoyably challenging, at others maddeningly inane. Jury’s still out on how I feel about the book but one thing's for sure is that this dude Pynchon is a master of language and the art of allusion. What makes the book so difficult to parse is not only it’s dense style but also the sheer amount of knowledge it makes use of. Finding “meaning” in the prose (which I put in quotes because Pynchon is purposefully slippery when it comes to takeaways) requires an intensive archaeology of obscure topics strewn across the worlds or literature, physics, classical studies and beyond.
It dawned on me after hearing “Rap Kingpin” that, while pulling from very different source material, Ghostface actually raps in almost precisely the same way Pynchon writes. His verses are tightly packed scatter plots of slang, cultural figureheads and real life anecdotes, impossible to parse discretely but painting abrasive and engaging portraits of Staten Island street life when viewed in totality. Take “Nutmeg” for example, Clientele’s crown jewel and first proper track, Ghost opens with a verse that references former Steelers wide receiver Dick Dolly to drive home a bar about blunt rolling, compares the lives of project kids on parole to Rapunzel, and uses the term “season they broth” to describe gunning someone down with a shotgun, it’s utter madness. A chapter of Gravity’s Rainbow reads similarly, especially as the book develops and has more of its own interiority to callback on. Later episodes are swirls of new and previously encountered characters wrapped up in new and previously encountered plots, all sounding vaguely referential, but, then again, it could just be utter nonsense. Did Ghostface read Pynchon? I don’t know, but it seems like they would get along, two great men of American letters flexing their erudition and trading witty repartees into the night.
SOTW: quinn - "let go"
The first WILTLW double feature. Not only was quinn’s lowlife one of the best projects I listened to last week, but “let go” is the best song I heard as well. quinn gives Frou Frou’s “Let Go” the Clams Casino treatment, reversing, chopping and atomizing Heap’s vocal against a vaporous backdrop of shuddering bass and monotonic hi-hats. She lays down a verse dedicated to burning the past and getting to the bag, I’ll leave you with a few of the lines that hit me the hardest: “don’t wanna think of the bad times they not funny to me,” “went to school with a class clown/last time I checked he a gun man,” “10th grade I ain’t say shit but at least I had foamposites.”