Imaginary Everything - L'Orange & Namir Blade (2021)

I have a time-honored tradition at the end of each year of going through people’s “best of the year” lists and discovering a bunch of stuff from that year that I managed not to hear. This was one of those, but it quickly became one of my favorite hip hop records of the year.

L’Orange is the producer who made the beats. I would have sworn this was a live band being manipulated in the studio, but apparently he’s just that detailed at sampling and layering old records. The complexity of the songs, structure and form, seems impossible to create just from samples, but I guess that’s why people talk about him with reverence.

Namir Blade is the rapper bringing the vocal talent. He’s got a great flow and a lot of pathos to his lyrics. I don’t know if he’s particularly remarkable as a rapper, but he’s highly competent. He’s from Nashville, so maybe that inspired the bluesy sound of the samples. It gives him a lot to work with and dig into and he does, dancing deftly around the bets and samples.

Tracks I Liked

Nihilism - Interesting lyric, awesome track

Corner Store Scandal - wins hands-down the award for best phrasing of the line “All I ever wanted was a bag full of money”