Buzz Sound: Angry Blackmen

Photo by Joseph Torres

Artist: Angry Blackmen, the duo of Quentin Branch and Brian Warren

Location: Chicago, IL

Buzz: Mainstream rap and hip-hop sound awfully content falling by the wayside of playing it safe in their production for the sake of gaming streaming lately, and as its alternative underground swirls into a stream-of-conscious art form that’s been consistent but likely to lead to an inevitable crowded field of soundalikes, the arrival of Chicago duo Angry Blackmen and their breakthrough sophomore effort, The Legend of ABM, plays like a much welcome shock to the genre’s body. Armand Hammer prefaced this seachange of energy on last year’s great darker, experimentally-dense turn, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and like their more jagged predecessors less concerned with a flow finesse, Quentin Branch and Brian Warren bite into their own take on the Black experience by starting new fires. Bars are built on a hard foundation of apocalyptic industrial punk and electronic beats, and the listen warps walls and shatters mirrors throughout. The matter that makes up their violent poetry hits the nerves with intentionality. Low lights and tragedies eviscerate in passing through them. At the other end of the end of this world, The Legend of ABM is a story of surviving.

Sound: A system overload of personal data and glitches in the hip-hop space-time continuum that rattle the skull from the inside.

Recommended: “FNA’, “FUCK OFF”, “Sabotage” off their recently released sophomore album, The Legend of ABM

Angry Blackmen’s The Legend of ABM is available now on Deathbomb Arc.