The defining moment for Phiik and Lungs so far remains a grainy video of the duo standing before racks of t-shirts in a Hoboken vintage store, rapping like their lives depend on it. As a droning loop unfurls and a raspy voice croaks, “What the fuck is good,” two boyish-looking white guys emerge, black hoodies cinched around their faces. Lungs, whose blond brows and eyelashes intensify his unblinking gaze, raps like a wartime Morse code transmission, warning of an impending anxiety attack. His skinny frame is almost alien; he jabs a bony index finger at each syllable to ensure the doomsday message sinks in. Behind him, Phiik bobs like a sidelined AND1 hooper, occasionally mouthing along. When he’s up, he darts to the mic, immediately unwinding a percussive flow that ripples and sputters like raindrops on a drumhead. “Life is anything but a dream,” he spits, “and I’m foaming at the mouth.”
The video, which was filmed for Top Shelf Premium’s Off Top freestyle series, captures the sheer intensity of Phiik and Lungs as a duo. Their chemistry comes easy. They both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since high school, sharing an admiration of early Def Jux and Wu-Tang records. In 2014, Lungs joined Tase Grip, the New York City collective founded by AKAI SOLO. Phiik quickly followed suit. Theirs is a tape-saturated, dusty-but-digital sound, fresh and immediate but strikingly outside of time. The four entries in the pair’s Another Planet series, all produced by Lungs himself under the moniker LoneSword, are full of frantic, imagistic rapping over distressed samples and the occasional brittle drum loop. On Another Planet 4, the two pushed their eccentric flows further than before, partly to see if they could, but mostly, as Phiik put it on the Reel Notes podcast, to “bang ‘em over the head.”
Houston producer Olasegun helms the boards on their new album Carrot Season, providing sunlit, loungey beats full of vibraphones, chorused guitars, and crisp Pete Rock snares. It’s still highly insular music, a mesmerizing deluge of internal rhymes and intricately arranged syllables, surely the product of round-the-clock recording sessions and bottomless bags of weed. But the rappers have more fully developed the contours of their voices, adding shading and depth to what could otherwise come off as exhaustingly mechanical.
Much of the record’s buoyancy comes from Phiik and Lungs’s palpable love for the craft. It’s clear they’re both committed to rap as a practice, fascinated by the mechanics and malleability of language (in that same Reel Notes interview, Phiik recalls seeing a garbage bag full of Lungs’s rhyme books, each page filled to the margins). Lungs still raps like a ticker tape printout but finds the areas of give in his once-rigid cadence. On songs like “Who // Eagle Eye” and “Kurt McBurt,” he thaws his creaking monotone with a soft lilt, giving his rambly, punctuation-free lines a bit more space. Phiik’s flow is lithe, often graceful, bouncing between drums like protons seeking a negative charge. He’ll fixate on a particular sound and observe it from all angles, like on “Daily Operation:” “Sunrises with only psilocybin and simple silence/I’m breaking the science behind waking up a sleeping giant.”
Neither rapper seems concerned with narrative, following instead a bent internal logic, each bugged-out image melting into the next. Phiik issues left-field roasts of lesser emcees, like on “PSG Grip,” when he explains that “every rapper an alcoholic missing their lederhosen.” Lungs often pens evocative single-line character studies, like how “the custy on a girls’ trip to the Galapagos Islands” or that “the plug’s kid a psychotic mess, if left unchecked, would be the next Putin.” Phiik imagines his death as the end of a race in Mario Kart; Lungs brews a special herbal tea, which he warns is “not legal for obvious reasons.”
An off-the-cuff, communal vibe permeates Carrot Season, as though the album is a long-lost Stretch and Bobbito freestyle session, with rappers like AKAI SOLO and Homeboy Sandman showing up to kick a quick verse and linger in the blunt rotation. Given its density and hour-long runtime, the record’s vibrant colors can sometimes bleed together. It’s a lot to wrap your arms around, especially given Olasegun’s proclivity for slippery beat switches and jarring, interstitial samples. Still, Carrot Season goes down remarkably easy, the goopy, psychotropic reduction you’d get if you left Funcrusher Plus and Table Scraps on to boil.
