If Nappy Nina were a comic book character, her thought bubbles would fill whole panels. In her music, the Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper’s thoughts flow in arcing run-ons that skip from prayers to confessions to flexes. Her latest album, Mourning Due, adds sighs to this skittish mix, reckoning with unspecified losses that stalk Nina’s writing and performances like a shadow. Though she never fills in this looming backstory, strong features and beats keep the music engaging.
Nina has a pianissimo timbre that brings to mind your “inside voice,” to use a grade school phrase. Her near-whisper and poetic lyricism somewhat recall Ladybug Mecca and Noname, but her love of double-time cadences and assonant rhyme schemes puts her closer to Homeboy Sandman and fellow Oaklander Suga Free. Yet unlike all of those rappers, Nina rarely writes punchlines or jokes, instead chronicling her life as a queer Black woman in Brooklyn. She’s too guarded to be considered a diarist, but her lyrics are rooted in everyday concerns, especially survival. “I’m saying, lately I’m staying/Tethered to turfs where I’m sanctioned,” she raps on “Amen,” outlining her fraught relationship with public spaces. Her frequent allusions to grief suggest private spaces don’t offer much sanctuary either, though the writing never builds on these brief disclosures. “My lists of loss are lengthy,” she says on “Sorrel Sip,” a typical gloss. To cope, she turns to weed and sleep, but slumber offers little consolation. She either wakes up and feels unrested, or is unable to tuck in and quiet her mind, a vicious cycle captured by both the cheeky album art and a vivid line from “Amen”: “I awoke in a fire, so tired kept sleeping.”The production often taps into that conflicted sense of drowsy jitter, pairing nocturnal torpor with restless motion. New York producers dane.zone (Sonnymoon, Quelle Chris), JWords (Maassai, MIKE), and Nelson Bandela (Terence Etc., Nick Hakim) provide nearly all the beats. They favor a one-two punch of loopy keys and hard, shuffling percussion, a combo that fits Nina’s hushed but racing anxiety raps. “Peddles” exemplifies the album’s sound, as Nina and guest OHMi glide over teetering drums and airy chords.
In her verse, Nina uses the phrase “hyperlink-type beats,” a funny and apt description of Mourning Due’s electro boom bap sound and that of other upbeat, electronic-inspired production styles seen on H3IR’s ve·loc·i·ty, Wiki and NAH’s Telephonebooth, and They Hate Change’s Finally, New. These albums avoid the punch-drunk soul loops that have dominated underground rap for the past few years, popularized by Earl Sweatshirt, Roc Marciano, and Griselda Records. The departure from that approach suggests it may be losing appeal in some corners, though no particular ethos appears to be driving the shift. Whatever the cause, there’s clearly a growing interest among producers and rappers in the textures and cadences of noise, ambient, and trip-hop, as seen on recent albums like Moor Mother and billy woods’ BRASS, as well as JPEGMAFIA’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs—the strongest records this turn has produced. The production on Mourning Due isn’t as adventurous as anything on those records, but its bubbly digital textures enliven Nina’s flows.The album loses steam when the beats take cues from R&B, growing more leisurely and atmospheric. Those instrumentals are strong on their own, but they don’t fit Nina’s bashful style—a mismatch underscored by the magnetic presence of the many featured artists, who basically all hit home runs. Moor Mother’s verse on “Stone Soup” is the album’s best: In the span of a minute, she coolly interpolates Nas’ “Ether” and references time travel, Kara Walker tableaus, and “Bennie and the Jets”—a mix of wit, personal touchstones, and precise imagery that eludes Nina for 14 songs. Mourning Due is her strongest release, but she’s not yet figured out how to turn stray thoughts into developed ideas.
