After a decade straight of continually lacing New England artists with memorable heaters, seeing “Grubby Pawz” is all it takes for me to check something out in 2026. This time, pressing play was a curveball to the face.
My initial reaction to starting this video was to check if I had some other audio playing on my laptop or the mixer; the intro sounds like two different songs glitching out at the same time. That also turns out to be pretty much the whole beat, so maybe that’s a compliment these days. Maybe that’s a deliberate wave.
“BABYBABYBABY” is some disorienting shit, no question, as baffling as it is entertaining. I don’t know what kind of label meeting would have ever come up with the pitch “What if Prodigy sounded more like R. Kelly?” That kind of organic innovation only happens in the wild.
This cannot be dismissed as “pop” anything, however. Caev is most definitely spitting. These are intricate bars, and what’s interesting is how they’re all lathered with Antares gloss but not actually autotuned. All the melodies are just him in the booth; he’s one of them dual threats who could lace an R&B hook just as easily as he kills a sixteen, a versatile voicebox.
There’s been a lot of curveballs like that out of Boston lately, which is cool to see. That city was squarely in NYC’s shadow for as long as they’ve had a hip hop scene, but that curse seems to have finally lifted in the past decade. I would earnestly argue that curse was undone by Estee Nack and Al.Divino performing some kind of ritual while experiencing heroic doses of psychedelic medicine. That wave connects to this video pretty directly, in fact.
This was a cool experiment of a demo and they absolutely over-delivered on the actual music video, but that’s the best I can say for it. I didn’t dig it, but if this is the setup for an album, I’m mighty curious to hear what the fuck they’ll do next. Mission Accomplished, right? Three Dickies.
