“The lark is not a performance, the craft is not a joke even if everything else is comedy. Hmmm, does that make sense? Once we feel it, remember that feeling and refine it ’til it’s seizable and the mode is yours to enter and exit at will. That control attained is glorious to me,” AKAI SOLO prefaces his latest album, No Control, No Glory. Man, it can sometimes feel exhausting to be inside the Brooklyn underground rapper’s head, but it’s always been marvel to hear whatever the end result of that internal monologuing chaos brings out creatively into the world.

The key phrase in all of the above? “Refine it ’tis it’s seizeable.” Collectively, SOLO’s put together one of the better master classes on the art of over-thinking it all through an uncanny stylistic eloquence, even when it’s tangled and messy. The overarching story of AKAI SOLO’s body of work these last few years since he began dropping dizzying thesis statements on existential discord through the collage rap medium is how it has since become cloudlike and spiritual in form.

No Control, No Glory‘s cast of producers in his constant Wavy Bagels alongside August Fanon, Lonesword, coffeeblack, groundskeepr, Mari Geti, playahaze, Shingu, and Stability really step to his level in their own crafts by meeting this same energy. Together, the rhymesmith and the beatmakers transform the ground beneath which he walks. It’s akin to the epiphanic sensation that makes you feel like you’re levitating in air and eventually, the place where the soul touches starlight. This is the clutter of all that over-wrought chaos floating through his head, as close as can be to clarified.

Highlights: “Peace to the Heavens!”, “Free The World”, “Galaxy Eyes, PT 2”

AKAI SOLO’s No Control, No Glory is available now on Break All Records.

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