In his short career, jackzebra has seemed dead set on releasing as much music as possible, producing a captivatingly uneven body of work. In the past six years, the 23-year-old Chengdu MC born Zhang Zhengkai has issued roughly 20 solo rap projects, half a dozen collabs, and two albums (Apple and People) under his jackapplepeople alias that show a softer, poppier side. This desire has driven him to excess of late: Fall 2024’s 王中王 (King of Kings) and winter 2025’s Above & Beyond both had hour-plus runtimes across 30-plus tracks. And while there is magnificent foliage to be found in these forests of distorted plugg beats and warped vocals, there’s also overgrowth. On his latest endeavor, Hunched Jack Mixtape, he prunes back the deadwood to reveal something more like a traditional album.
Raised in Xujing, a Shanghai suburb with a small-town vibe, Zhang started making music in his mid-teens. The quality of his work has improved rapidly since his earliest projects, on which he rapped in an ironically detached English. This music was aesthetically interesting but devoid of substance. His trajectory changed when Chinese cloud rap progenitor Bloodz Boi became his mentor, encouraging him to rap in Mandarin and upgrade his home recording setup. Watching him blossom, Bloodz Boi has referred to Zhang as “China’s Lil B,” noting that he’s the first Chinese rapper with a larger following outside the Great Firewall than within its confines.
Hunched Jack Mixtape, his first official release for evilgiane’s iconoclastic New York label Surf Gang, boasts a cast of producers fit for a rising star. Starting strong, Zhang enlists vaporwave veteran James Ferraro and hyperpop shapeshifter Glasear to produce five of the first seven tracks. These beats contain only hints of Ferraro’s ghostly presence, but they’re some of the tape’s best. “Leon,” a particularly ferocious cut, features merciless production: Nearly subsonic kicks and slashing snares that conspire with doomsday bass to evoke the experience of watching from a ship’s deck as the storm approaches. Zhang’s delivery is no less vicious, his voice hovering just above the bass, stretched almost to a breaking point and punctuated by screams. A few minutes later, on “Run,” he drops into an even lower register over a vintage trap beat from Glasear and Swedish cloud rap vet Woesum. “What did you do wrong?/Why are you hiding?” he growls tunelessly in Mandarin, as if he’s spitting on the song’s cowardly subject.
Zhang is most potent on Hunched Jack’s early tracks. By the end of the first bar, he’s already stepped into his persona—the damaged, reclusive anti-hero. “Snuggled in my bedroom counting money until my hands are sore,” he sings like a twee Future on “Parrot,” the tape’s soft-edged opener. “Going to the corner store together to buy snacks/You'd borrow change from me when you didn't have enough,” he warbles on “Brother,” lamenting long-severed family ties. “We used to have a warm home, but now, like a tree falling and the monkeys scattering/When disaster strikes, even the slowest bird flies.” On “Human,” he’s self-deprecating and disaffected like Bladee, but his moaning delivery sounds more like Carti over Ferraro and Glasear’s rage beat. Young rappers around the world share these MCs’ styles in their DNA, but few have Zhang’s ability to recombine their influence in new ways. Zhang’s vocals tend to be so slurred and laden with effects that his lyrics are hard to parse, even for native Mandarin speakers. But if you read his lyrics, you will find intense imagery and startling turns of phrase to reveal cracked pieces of his inner world.
Hunched Jack Mixtape loses some steam on the home stretch, but there are heavy hitters on its pluggy, low-key back half, too. “Avatar,” featuring Surf Gang MC Harto Falion and produced by evilgiane, cements Zhang’s place as an agile insider in an insular group half a world away. As he and his guest go bar for bar, their stoned, behind-the-beat flows sync up seamlessly across the language barrier. And “Givenchy” sets Zhang’s staccato quarter-note monotone against the tactile machine-gun hi-hats of another giane beat, this one built in collaboration with NYC plugg producer Elipropper. In fact, the majority of the tape’s instrumentals come from sets of two producers who, in most cases, balance each other out and push each other further. Along with his swooping vocal inflections and gleeful tag, this stylistic solidity allows Zhang to pick up the thread that’s run from his trollish early work and pull it forward. Backed by these major-league beats, he sounds more assured of his charmingly anti-social aura than ever.
