About 15 years ago, Kwesi Darko, under his Blue Daisy alias, was hailed as the next Tricky or Burial or Flying Lotus or Massive Attack, depending on who you asked. His debut album, The Sunday Gift, offered all the playful energy associated with the experimental L.A. beat scene of the time, but rubbed with a distinctly London grit, Technicolor synths strobing across dark corners. He was tipped by tastemakers from Mojo to Mary Anne Hobbs and sent touring around the world—at which point Darko decided he’d had enough of other people’s expectations. Stubborn, mercurial, and determined to do things his own way, he adopted a darker, rap-focused alias: Dahlia Black.
“Fuck a Rap Song” arrived in 2013 sounding like a UK “Yonkers,” or Danny Brown if he’d grown up in Dalston, not Detroit. By Darko’s own admission, the success of “Fuck a Rap Song” made him want to shrink away. So—establishing a pattern early in his career—that’s what he did, shelving Dahlia Black. A few more Blue Daisy releases followed, but Darko’s focus shifted to a role behind the boards, where he built up a discography of alt-rap releases that threaded across genre boundaries—and pushed his collaborators towards more visceral sounds. He worked with Sampa the Great, Denzel Curry, Meekz, Pa Salieu, and, most notably, Slowthai. All that’s a lot to cast off as now, another decade later, another solo venture emerges from its larval case. But the arc of Darko’s career is not a straightforward curve. And “Altitude,” the opener on this first solo EP as Kwes Darko, hits like a pillow case filled with concrete.
From that chugging, industrial, dembow thump at its opening, God of the Youth is a brief, bludgeoning statement of return. Darko takes dance music’s current, dominant strain of escapist bubblegum hedonism and calmly throttles it. It makes sense that these are solo songs: There is little room for anyone else in the dense wash of synths and crackling drums. Even something ostensibly minimal, like the title track, is still smothering and tense, like drowning in molten steel. It’s all impact, little beauty.
“In circles” is more foundry sounds than found sound, with kicks like clanging metal hammers on anvils, reels of razor wire synths pulled tight. Darko moved last year from his London home to New York, in search of new challenges, and these songs have the rough, intriguing edges of an artist enjoying the process again. The streaky topline on “Prayers deceased” jaunts back and forth over a menacing undertow, while “Altitude” is a pressure cooker of sparking hi-hats and echoing robotic vocals.
Darko’s exploratory approach also runs the risk of diminishing returns, and, played back to back, the rhythms here meld into one another, at times pesteringly repetitive. The EP’s closer, “The heat rains,” meanders to the point of sounding like a pale reflection of the title track—which wouldn’t matter so much if there were more than just a couple of other tracks separating them. Mostly, though, this skull-rattling collection serves as a reminder—or restatement—of Darko as a perennial outsider invariably worthy of attention.
