Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Seoul producer Yetsuby’s music, like that of her duo Salamanda, is a jumble of brightly colored baubles: marbles and beach glass, sequins and gumdrops, all spun into mesmerizingly symmetrical abstractions. You might be momentarily reminded of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Steve Reich, ’90s ambient, and fantastical video-game soundtracks, yet the references float by so gently and swiftly that you’re too swept up in the downy tumult to think too closely about them. But there’s a moment on Yetsuby’s new album 4EVA that’s so uncharacteristically strident, it might make you wonder if someone else’s audio files got mixed in with hers on the way to the mastering engineer.
“SOUNDCLOUD”—a title, a genre, a browser tab?—begins more or less like her most upbeat tracks typically do, with a beat made of balloon squeaks and finger snaps. But the offbeats are punctuated by what might be the trumpeting of a tetchy elephant; an agitated teakettle adds a dash of pandemonium. Egged on by rushing, rolling breakbeats, gruffly squawking cut-up vocals further stoke the frantic mood. It sounds like a Bomb Squad tribute fronted by a harried Dizzee Rascal and recorded on a diet of Pop Rocks and Coke.
The garishness of the sensory overload marks the song as an outlier in Yetsuby’s catalog, but it shares the restlessly inventive spirit found in the rest of her work. In the context of the new album, “SOUNDCLOUD” signals Yetsuby’s refusal to fall back on old patterns. On 4EVA, she’s determined to try new things, even if they risk damaging the veneer of her typically beatific music. It’s her most energetic record yet, heavily informed by contemporary club styles though rarely reducible to any one sound or mood.
The album opens with a fake-out. “s2WINGS s2” begins as a soft explosion of gold dust, filigreed layers of wordless Auto-Tune tracing curlicues atop thrumming chimes and dewdrop synths; it sounds a little bit like Skrillex’s “With You, Friends (Long Drive)” reimagined by beatless techno wiz Barker. It gathers steam as it goes, levels rising as though it’s about to peak in a concussive drop. Instead, having reached some imperceptible zenith, it simply dissolves into a fine spray of acoustic guitar artifacts, like Jim O’Rourke’s Eureka run through an atomizer. “FLY,” which follows, might be a remix of the same sound files: same tempo, same angelic coo, same pointillistic pastel rush. The drums are punchier, the groove more pronounced, but the predominant feeling is an almost overwhelming oxytocin glow, a tidal wave of bliss.
Things briefly get heavier: “Aestheti-Q” rides a brisk, syncopated drum pattern and a barrage of monosyllabic vocal samples fashioned into a hiccuping arpeggio. But even in the album’s most insistent moments, what stands out is the high-def quality of her production—like a flickering handclap sound hard-panned across the stereo channels, making you feel like you’re flanked by a pair of militant hummingbirds. Crystalline sounds come in waves, a gentle juggernaut of prismatic streamers and laser zaps—Jersey club reimagined as a geyser of diamonds.
The album’s back half turns weirder and more freeform. “;P” drifts like an amorphous cloud of metallic space debris, Wall-E chirps and warbling Auto-Tune lending an emotional center to the chaos. The title track pairs children’s choirs with xylophone and chunky breakbeats, a rave anthem for a cartoon paradise. And “Where is my..” and “aaa1” fold in music boxes and ’60s jazz, Hollywood strings and cricket chirps, before “I AM 뇌로운 인간” closes the album out with the shirred textures—crinkling up voice, guitar, and synths like wads of colored cellophane—that DJ Koze loves so much.
The song’s title comes from a childhood portrait of the artist drawn by her younger sister, accompanied by the Korean-language caption “나는 뇌로운 인간” (I am a brain-ful human)—a misspelling of what should have read “외로운 인간” (lonely human). Yetsuby calls the song a meditation on solitude, and a certain sense of melancholy does bleed through its intricate counterpoints. But that accidental reference to the artist’s “brain-ful” nature feels apt. Surrounded by fantastical designs of her own invention, she reminds me of Blade Runner’s J.F. Sebastian and his genetically engineered menagerie of cuddly, bumptious critters. With an imagination like hers, Yetsuby will always have someone to keep her company.
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By day, Erika de Casier deals out soft-spoken come-ons and kiss-offs via throwback R&B. By night, she’s an incognito hitmaker. Last year de Casier lent a steely edge to Floridian producer Nick Léon’s heady summer club cut “Bikini,” and in 2023 she got in the studio with K-pop group NewJeans, co-writing several songs from their Get Up EP—among them the winningly naive “Super Shy.” The Danish singer has quietly left her fingerprints all over pop’s ongoing Y2K revival, but sometimes at the cost of Erika de Casier the solo recording artist. While her last album, 2024’s Still, could often stun and delight—the laugh and twinkling chimes that kick off “Lucky” never fail to make me grin—a spate of unnecessary guest features diluted its creator’s singular talents. Entirely self-written, self-produced, and released on her own label, Independent Jeep Music, Lifetime is a deliberate recentering, de Casier’s attempt to single-handedly distill the better part of a decade into one highly potent vibe.
Forgoing her trademark nostalgia for the ’00s, de Casier has committed herself to pre-Napsterdom in spirit and sound, triangulating three high-concept pop lodestars all released between 1992 and 1998: Janet Jackson’s Janet., Madonna’s Ray of Light, and, at the apex of her altar, Sade’s Love Deluxe. Every song here fades in—how retro is that—on a bed of aqueous synthesizers, buoyed by boom-bap drums. “If you know, what I’d do, do to you,” de Casier coos on album opener “Miss,” her voice enveloped in so much reverb that it dissolves at the edges. One working title for Lifetime was Midnight Caller, an easy shorthand for seduction, mystery, and menace rolled into one. Several tracks (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “The Chase,” “Two Thieves”) even incorporate what are either diegetic dial tones—a noted Janet-ism—or soundwaves shaped to convincingly mimic one.
As “Miss” yields to the hothouse piano and tabla of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Lifetime takes a turn towards Pure Moods, and with that some period-accurate new-age triteness: “Health or disease—you never know what you get/Might as well live gratefully.” But de Casier delivers these songs archly and suggestively—a glimmer in her eye, liquor on her breath—and the lyric sheet is appropriately marked up with each stray “uh,” “uhmm,” “ah,” and “mmh-mhh.” On “Moan,” a spiritual successor to Jackson’s “Throb,” her hypnotic entreaty to “just make love” warps the whole track around it, as represented by an impassioned keysmash: “%!//&”//“/!!/!(()!=“##=”. The syncopated hook of “Delusional,” built around a sample immortalized by Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” is irresistibly ear-catching, as is the way de Casier’s tongue catches on “slow mo-tion,” right before “You Got It!” kicks up a spray of seafoam. And once in a while, de Casier will hit on something profound: “The truth was in the bottom of the wine/Bordeaux can make you talk a lot,” she notes, soberly, on the trip-hop standout “December.”
If the results of Lifetime’s solo writing process are mixed, de Casier’s work behind the boards is wall-to-wall dazzling, from the extraterrestrial rave stabs that pan across the stereo field on “Seasons” to the mournful cyborg whose voice echoes her own on “December.” Beginning as a funky, TLC-style creeper, “Two Thieves” gradually grinds down to an industrial chug that would do Massive Attack proud. But there are challenges that come with jacking completely into the mainframe. Lifetime lacks a commanding, sharply defined persona at its center—a sensuous Janet, an adamant Sade Adu, a Madonna brashly taking stabs at transcendence. De Casier seems to worry about this, too. “When the light’s out/Do you still see me,” she ponders aloud on the record’s title track, but one can’t be sure what to look for, other than “lipstick, blush, eyes half open and a feeling that’s so bold.” Then again, the best operatives never make the front page. Here is a master of soft power at work.
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