Kiss the Ring was a triumphant moment for Rome Streetz, the culmination of a long-simmering underground career filled with razor-edged street raps and furrowed-brow beats. It was Rome’s Griselda debut, extending a hot streak for the prestige label that kicked into high gear with Westside Gunn’s 2020 magnum opus, Pray for Paris. Gunn tapped the perfect team of gritty-but-trippy producers for Rome’s nasal, piston-firing delivery, and Rome seemed to dip his pen in acid. There’s an argument that Kiss the Ring was the apotheosis of the Griselda sound, the last moment before the dam broke and flooded DSPs with half-hearted boom-bap revival drums and vaguely hard-nosed coke raps. Rome has struggled to fully separate himself from the glut; subsequent records, like 2023’s Noise Kandy 5 and Hatton Garden Holdup, his 2024 linkup with founding Griselda producer Daringer, feel like walking in circles—Rome’s in constant motion, but headed nowhere. Trainspotting, his new collaboration with Conductor Williams, is a solid, mostly successful attempt at a reset. Conductor produced nearly half of Kiss the Ring, and the album builds upon their excellent chemistry. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes entrancing listen, even if it falls a little short of their previous magic.
Rome’s main strength is his capacity to make acrobatic rapping sound easy. He’s a masterful technician in perpetual motion, churning out stanzas that fill every space of a beat with mesmeric precision. He can take somewhat pedestrian rhyme schemes and break them into syllabic math problems, creating tension that leads to startling payoffs. The lines, “I’ve been shittin’ on every cheap rinky-dink rendition/Do somethin’ different, you’ll probably get a listen/I’m in Louis linen, lit in Lisbon, livin’,” on the second verse of “Connie’s Revenge,” don’t exactly push the bounds of slant rhyme, but he moves around the downbeat like a deft boxer, landing the end of each phrase when you least expect it. It’s thrilling to hear him nail a particularly daring bar structure and never break a sweat.
The problem is that Rome’s writing doesn’t always match up to his technical prowess. He seems more interested in maintaining a mythos than in pushing his pen to new heights—the punchlines aren’t really zingers, and the boasts of microphone or sexual prowess come off a bit first-thought best-thought. His stories feel authentic to him, but distant to the listener; it’s the feeling you get when you stare at a word long enough to forget its meaning. Conductor’s trippy, off-kilter style suits his sneering delivery well, but it’s disappointing to hear a rapper with such commanding presence issue boilerplate rhymes like, “You sold your soul to the pied piper/Shit I touch turn to gold, I’m a prime-time rhyme writer,” over production this weird. Overall, these songs sound great, but you could control-x any of Rome’s verses, paste them on any beat from the Griselda extended universe, and not really notice.
Trainspotting’s biggest accomplishment is in providing the best star-making moment for Conductor Williams yet. The Kansas City producer’s profile has skyrocketed over the past few years; he’s gone from an obscure Instagram discovery to earning placements on Drake and J. Cole records, though he keeps a foot in the underground, supplying beats for known quantities like Your Old Droog and billy woods and slept-on talents like Stik Figa and Jabee. He flexes some of his finest work yet on Trainspotting, stripping all superfluous elements from his signature warped-tape psychedelia to craft a sinister, spellbinding soundscape.
These tracks are full of chiming mandolins (“Ricky Bobby”), distorted guitar (“Andre Agassi”), and ghostly choral voices (“Runny Nose”), all caked with a layer of grime. “99 Attributes” is Conductor Williams’ sparest contribution, a simple, RZA-esque one-chord loop that becomes more hypnotic with each repetition. His drums often feel muffled, as if they’re being played under a weighted blanket in another room, but his skillful EQing retains their resounding thump. He’s at his best when crafting adventurous arrangements, like on “Died 1000 Times,” which switches between a sparse, achingly tense chorus and an airy, synth-driven verse where he drops out the snare to give Rome even more breathing room. On “Electric Slide,” he teases a drum pattern that doesn’t drop for a full minute and a half, creating a nail-biting sense of anticipation. It’s masterful instrumental work from one of the game’s most vital producers, but it’s a shame that the project can’t quite live up to the promise of its talents.
