Dropping multiple projects in a single year isn’t much of a flex in 2024. That’s just the table stakes to be part of the conversation these days. Crazy prolific is the baseline expectation, and very few artists get to step off that treadmill early. Most of them get burned out to hollow shells, stoned zombies recycling sixteens. Meanwhile, some of the best rap mutants of these wild-ass 2020’s have risen to the challenge in style, flooding the market with truly killer product & refusing to cut corners doing it. Estee Nack is currently the tip of that spear.
That’s arguable, for sure: there are dozens of other rappers stalking the underground right now who are equally, if not more, prolific. But in terms of consistency & ubiquity in these past two years, Nacky Chan is one of one.
His winning streak kicked off in back in 2018, and it’s wild to think that AKIRAONACID and SURFINONGOLD.WAV dropped the same year. That sort of symmetry is inevitable when you’re working with Supreme Mathematics. Equally wild to think that in 2023, Nack dropped his Griselda debut, Nacksaw Jim Duggan, and it wasn’t even close to his best LP that year. Mini Mansion Dust Vol. 6, his BRAP! joint with V-Don, and the Machacha collab .357 are all valid answers there. So is Live at the Tabernackle, my personal favorite, the project that convinced me Mike Shabb is not merely lucky, but an actual genius.
With so much momentum & hype, it’s easy to talk about Nack Mandela as if the man were some kind of newcomer. That is emphatically not the case, though. He is decades deep now. The blog era deliberately ignored a lot of regional scenes, and Boston was no exception. To be fair to the hypebeasts, though, there was good reason to be skeptical. The soil in New England was mighty dry back then; 20-something rappers in Beantown have no idea how bad it used to be, none. The run that Tragic Allies had during that drought was incredible, and a healthy majority of their catalog still holds up today.
It is also worth mentioning that when Portishead auteur Geoff Barrow was working on Quakers, his massive double-disc collage of psychedelic boom bap, Nack came up to bat right after Prince Po on the epic solo cut “Lost and Found.” That co-sign came back in 2012. Estee Nack was only ever a secret to dumb motherfuckers with no taste.
Futurewave is a producer from Toronto with an equally untouchable resume. While I feel he’s established & acclaimed, I travel in very occulted circles and there are hundreds of hidden masters like this in North America. How many flawless albums do you need to drop before you’re part of the conversation in 2024? In practice, it seems to be north of a dozen.
Futurewave has paid those dues, delivering top shelf product, non-stop, since 2018. Along the way, he’s worked with Rome Streetz, Boldy James, and now Estee Nack, with Stone Temple Pyrex. The album could be one of Nack’s best this year, but that is too soon to call. (He just dropped another one last week with Boneweso, SYSTEMATICALLY WE WERE NEVER FREE. There will be more.)
“DATEWITDEF” is everything you’d want from a single: cutting edge East Coast wildstyle over a frozen funeral march of a beat. These are master craftsmen who never miss because they know what they’re aiming for. That’s not nearly as common as you’d like to think. Five Dickies.
