In the summer of 2013, a year after fellow Chicagoan Chief Keef dropped Back From the Dead and around the same time Chance the Rapper uploaded Acid Rap, a 17-year-old named Lucki Eck$ put out his own striking record called Alternative Trap. While it might have lacked the blunt immediacy of Keef or the massive celebrity promise of Chance, Lucki’s project was unsparing, intermittently soulful, and it seemed to declare him as the next breakout star in a city that was already being strip-mined by major labels. He rapped about being a more reliable plug than other high schoolers with unnerving remove (“I served a few athletes/Leave ‘em lazy as old dogs”), and he did it over beats that sounded like the strains of electronic music that had been left out in the mud for weeks on end.
Lucki did not become a national star or even one of the more celebrated members of Chicago’s underground. Follow-up records like Body High and X were competent retreads but failed to get Lucki a commercial or stylistic foothold outside of the niche he’d carved out with his debut. He seemed to drift, leaving money and potential fans on the table. Drugs took a serious toll on his health and his relationships; in 2016, he became a father, and also announced a break from music that he hoped would allow him to sort through his issues with addiction. If the new music is to be believed, it didn’t help. Despite his early work being a clear predecessor, if not direct influence on some of the more catatonic lanes of current Soundcloud rap, Lucki seemed, until recently, to have run out of time to transcend cult status for himself.
If his arresting new record, Freewave 3, is a triumph, it’s a triumph of editing and stripping away the extraneous. Its 15 songs clock in at barely half an hour, and some—like the mournful “Out My Way”—cut off as soon as they’ve settled into a pocket, before the 90-second mark. More meaningfully, Lucki’s writing on the album does away with the optimism that sometimes buoyed Alternative Trap; he’s not interested in fleshing out other characters or putting together long narratives. Even his voice has become less expressive, close to monotone, hardened but exhausted. What’s left is a sometimes desperate, usually calm—eerily calm—dispatch from a young man able to diagnose his wounds but unable to repair them.
While the speaker in Lucki’s verses has changed dramatically since Alternative Trap, the production on Freewave 3 actually seems like a logical mutation from the beats on the debut. Some of the best come from ChaseTheMoney, who last year found a winning combination with Valee, and whose work here skews somber and paranoid. “All In,” which is produced by Earl Sweatshirt, is a compelling outlier, mixed differently from the rest of the album, as if it was emailed over from the sessions for 2018’s Some Rap Songs.
There are times throughout Freewave 3 when Lucki references a broken relationship (the best distillation comes from “More Than Ever”: “I know she ain’t loyal, but she make me better”), but that and everything else is secondary to the frequent and alarming asides about drugs. There are moments when Lucki can’t get his skin to stop itching; when he explains calmly to a girl that addiction is in his DNA and asks whether she ever saw herself falling for “a fiend”; when his stomach starts revolting; when the pills can’t even put him to sleep anymore. On the album’s best song, the Cash Cobain-produced “Peach Dream,” Lucki raps about his mother Googling the effects of lean on the body and sending her son literature about his endangered kidneys. Lucki sells all of this uncomfortably well because he writes in short, clipped phrases, the kinds of things you might think while you’re shivering, and because his vocals sound gruff and agitated. We’ve come to understand addiction as a thing people can’t simply reason themselves free from—and as a rational, if tragic reaction to trauma—and Freewave 3 treats it exactly as such.
