For an artist so rawly himself, the line between public and private is barely there. Offline, he’s a thinker, an introvert, an occasional burst of absurdity — but mostly a man chasing silence, retracing the map of his life to better navigate the present. If mystery clings to him, it’s not by design. In a world obsessed with access, he simply doesn’t find it necessary to over explain.
CRUEL WORLD, his latest album, is the exhale after years of introspection. A soundtrack to survival and self-invention, it confronts the chaos of a foundation shaped by crime, mental illness, and violence — only to flip it into triumph, high vibrations, and spirit-lifting sound. “This is me saying goodbye to that world,” he explains, “and paying homage to the sounds and cultures that carried me this far.”
Where previous projects like DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU. & SHAZAM honed in on singular moods or narratives, CRUEL WORLD swings open the gates. Every emotion, every contradiction, every version of himself spills out here. It’s a genre-bridging, hook-heavy collage where a hard-hitting Dr. Dre synth can sit comfortably beside a soul-searching ballad or a Captain Beefheart-inspired descent into beautiful madness.
Throughout the album, personas crash into each other. One minute he’s a Looney Tunes runaway on “heart to heart,” the next he’s a reluctant homebody on “don’t wanna party,” a candy bar or a convict on “bars and stripes forever,” or a mythic savior on “captain save-a-hoe.” Yet no matter the mask, the heart underneath is unmissable — particularly on vulnerable cuts like “age of healing,” where Southern California roots and personal reckoning intertwine over beats that still, somehow, slap.
Musically, CRUEL WORLD is a love letter to the black musical experience and a middle finger to its historic limitations. It pulls from post-disco, West Coast rap, 2000s R&B, and the broader DNA of legends like Badu, Suga Free, Prince, Beefheart, Solange, and Pharrell. Visualizing studio sessions with his heroes, he wrote, produced, performed, engineered, mixed, and mastered it all himself — an entire sonic multiverse born from one mind.
The colors are black and white with candy accents. The feeling is shedding skin. The mission is simple: entertain, connect, escape. And when the last notes of CRUEL WORLD fade out, you won’t be left with a perfectly manicured image. You’ll be left with something much better — a real human being, in all his complicated, chaotic glory, daring you to feel something.
