Corbin Smidzik has been off the grid. Transforming from a turtlenecked, viral R&B oddball into a reclusive crooner—one well equipped for apocalyptic times—isn’t something he could pull off while maintaining a Twitter presence or popping up at festivals. So into the woods he went, a young man wrestling with an unwieldy public persona. In 2013, when he was 15-years-old, Corbin first appeared online with Forest, an amateurish rap project released under his since-abandoned Spooky Black pseudonym that showcased his ear for ghoulish effects. It scanned as an Americanized take on Yung Lean’s #sadboy opus Unknown Death 2002: decent production bogged down by crude and violent lyrics that flyover state teens were high on after the Odd Future boom. He followed that several months later with Black Silk and abandoned the rap angle entirely, instead bringing to light his incredibly powerful voice, one that stirred up a cult following in short order. Combining the young Minnesotan’s organic vocal talent with delightfully low-budget music video treatments, songs like “Without U” and “DJ Khaled Is My Father” earned Corbin fans in the inner-circles of Drake and the Weeknd.
Now working with Toronto-by-way-of-Minneapolis producer Doc McKinney, who teamed with the Weeknd during the House of Balloons era, Corbin has honed his sound and refocused his energy. Gone are the days where a mention of the Spooky Black moniker merited a chuckle and an inquiry into just how serious we should take this teen with a bizarre aesthetic. Under his government name, Corbin is nearly an entirely different entity. He is driven by paranoia and isolation to some Vantablack levels of doom and gloom.
Corbin’s new album Mourn follows a loose narrative wherein our protagonist builds a bunker for himself and his lover to wait out the apocalypse. The protagonist passes away in a plane crash before things go belly up, and his lover dies alone. If you’re looking for a silver lining in the plot, you won’t find one, but the record does have some positive attributes elsewhere. Most notably, Corbin continues to carve out his signature sound vocally, cornering the market on world-weary vocal strain as an R&B approach.
Mourn is a difficult album to pin down, a piece of music that is both stylistically transcendent and lyrically half-baked. Some songs find Corbin pushing his vocal chords to their limits with guttural screams so packed with emotion you can feel the veins popping out of his neck as he digs through his soul with a rusty pickaxe. Corbin has toyed with this vocal style before, like on the Leaving EP track “Echoes in My Mind,” but he’s never exerted himself this far, to such a viscerally painful threshold. On other songs, like “Giving Up,” he cuts through with a throbbing baritone that shakes the spine. Opener “ICE BOY” is a standout, starting synthy and syncopated with Corbin’s hybrid growl-moan that crescendos into a mushroom cloud of emotion when he wails through the second chorus. “Oh I’m on ice/Can’t you tell?” he howls, with an arctic vocal sneer he credits to listening to black metal during the recording process.
“Find your bite tonight,” Corbin rasps on “Revenge Song,” a track about exacting grim vengeance on a rapist. The subject matter is bleak—a trip into the fractured mindset of a man beset by anger and grief over his true love’s story of being assaulted. The song ends with the couple visiting a house at the bottom of a hill in the dark of night to end the life of the man who abused her. The grim tale is matched by the operatic treatment it receives from Smidzik, who sings like he’s worn his voice down to the last, crying about the wrongs done to his lover, himself, and the world at large. On “Giving Up,” he drops in to say, “Had enough of this world, now I’m giving up,” emerging from the song’s nearly 40-second intro like a specter from the back of a cave. Throughout Mourn, this lyric feels most like Corbin’s mission statement. Take a look around, he implores the listener, because clearly things aren’t going the way they should be.
Tonally, this material feels like a manifesto of sorts. But there’s still room for Corbin to grow. With pulsating, gothic production throughout from Shlohmo and D33J, Mourn is an end-times tale told with a youthful energy that contrasts its finality with freshness. It’s an industrial R&B soundtrack that would not sound out of place in Lars von Trier’s ode to impending doom, Melancholia, but coded through the hectored mind-frame of a young person growing up in the brutal reality we currently occupy. These are teenaged ruminations on the futility of a life without love, a showing of so many feelings fully felt but only half-formed.
