“ITS ALMOST DRY” | BY PUSHA T - Hiphop Culture Reads, Music, Kicks and Services

This Virginia rapper’s latest is musically varied and vocally impressive, revealing as an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting and drill closer to the core of his style.

Distinctive in his generation—would be compelling if he were rapping on a click track. But after the Clipse, the duo he had formed with his brother Malice, disbanded, the Virginia Beach rapper’s early solo efforts were marred by production that often suffocated him. Records like 2011’s Fear of God II: Let Us Pray and 2013’s Wrath of Caine can get lost in the digital-maximalist wilderness. Though he’d navigated similar lanes nimbly in the past, Pusha was now drowned out by beats that were crowded in the most predictable, post-Lex Luger ways, some of which he even let lure him into conspicuously borrowedflows. He eventually shed this to find something meaner and radically spare; his most recent album, 2018’s seven-song, 21-minute Daytona, mirrors this minimalism in its very construction.