The mixtape that introduced us to The Weeknd
In 2011 Abel Tesfaye was a mere blip on the radar. Having dropped out of high school a few years prior, he was living in Parkdale with a few friends, dabbling in excessive drug use and partying, but behind all this, a true star was being made. On March 21st, Abel would become The Weeknd when he released his first official project titled House of Balloons. A mixtape that would start his journey from a lowly misfit out of Scarborough to one of music’s biggest artists. Moreover, his dark, atmospheric, and moody take on R&B would shift the genre in…
The soundtrack to the apocalypse
If there’s one band who refuses to be boxed into one style or sound that would surely be Bring Me The Horizon. Since their inception in the early 2000’s, they shifted from earsplitting death-core on their debut Count Your Blessings, to melodic metal-core starting with 2010’s There Is A Hell… to full-blown pop-rock meets electronica on last year’s Amo, my favourite album of 2019. The change in sound has certainly divided their fanbase, but the quintet is more than confident with their choice to constantly subvert expectations, and the results have been quite stellar. …
The duality of the U.K.’s most inventive new rapper.
Coming off the high from his 2019 debut Nothing Great About Britain, Slowthai angered the likes of British nationalists. He was an estate kid that grew up with nothing, who hated the establishment of his country and set out to make it known, going so far as to brandish a severed head of Boris Johnson during a live performance. From his punk rock energy to his quirky persona amidst his other stage antics (stripping down to his boxers being a staple.) the album showcased his raw thoughts on the social ills he had gone through, his music came at the…
Yeezus by Kanye West Retrospective | The Anti-Rap Album
Retrospective is a series where I take a look at albums from years prior, and revisit them with a 2021 lens. Examining production, lyrics, and other interesting tidbits.
It’s still hard to believe that this year will be the 8-year anniversary of Mr.West’s sixth studio album Yeezus. Released on June 18th, 2013, Kanye would take a sharp turn away from the maximalist, rap opera sound he showcased on 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in exchange for something never before seen in mainstream hip-hop. Yeezus was, and still is, Kanye’s most polarizing body of work to date. Characterized by its…
The following article was originally published on my now-defunct Wix website in 2018.
3 years ago today, Kendrick Lamar’s third studio album To Pimp a Butterfly dropped eight days ahead of its March 23rd release date. An error caused by Interscope Records made the album available in its entirety on Itunes and Spotify. Whether or not TPAB came out ahead of its set date or not, I still wasn’t prepared for what I was about to witness. This is an album that to this day, I consider to be the best rap album I’ve heard in the past 8 years…
Nearly 11 years after Man on the Moon: The End of Day, Kid Cudi concludes the series he started his musical journey with on Man on the Moon III: The Chosen. In between the decade long gap, Cudi has grown as an artist. Experimenting with grunge on Speedin Bullet 2 Heaven, collaborating with mentor Kanye West on 2018’s acclaimed KIDS SEE GHOSTS, to forming a new duo dubbed The Scotts with Travis Scott are just a few examples of what he’d been up to since the last MOTM. Seeing him come back full circle to the story that introduced the…
It took a while for SAINt JHN to be at the level of mainstream recognition he’s at right now. Starting off as a songwriter for artists like Usher and Jidenna, and releasing two albums in the last couple of years (Collection One & Ghetto Lenny Love Songs respectively). He would go unnoticed until earlier in 2020 when one of his first singles “Roses” would get remixed by Kazakh DJ Imanbek, making the four-year-old song a Billboard chart-topper and a TikTok anthem. Instead of reveling in the success of that one song and feeding into the one-hit-wonder fad, The Guyanese artist…
If there’s one thing right this clusterfuck of a year we call 2020 did for me, its that it reinvigorated my love for heavy metal, a genre I’ve been ashamed and judged for liking since my teen years. I got the chance to catch up on a lot of great albums and equally great artists such as Deftones. Matter of fact a few months ago I spent a week listening to them straight and talked about my favorite albums from their discography, which you can read here. Well, here we are now with the band’s ninth studio album Ohms and…
Admittedly I was never the biggest fan of Marilyn Manson, even during my younger days as a wannabe scene kid I never gravitated towards his music. I always found his imagery repulsive and his music never resonated with me. It wouldn’t be until I started my undergrad 5 years ago that I somehow got exposed to him (and a myriad of other musicians) through 2015’s The Pale Emperor, suddenly I was intrigued. I ended up going through most of his discography, educating myself more on his lyricism and his place as music’s astral vampire. Safe to assume I’m actually a…
After years of development, a series of delays, and a massive spoiler leak. The Last Of Us Part 2 has been through hell and back, the events leading up to its release were as bleak as the post-pandemic world both we and the characters of the game were living in but yet, the game has miraculously arrived. I’ve been keeping up with the game’s release for years now, as a fan of the first game I was eagerly anticipating this sequel. I trotted through the spoilers, I mean I pretty much saw everything that got leaked but still, I was…
Mark Chinapen
I like to pretend I’m a critic.
