When Na-Kel Smith began rapping, it was little more than a diversion. By the time Odd Future had crossed over from the shops on Fairfax to Tumblr to the American mainstream, Smith, a native of South LA, was already a professional skateboarder, associated with the raucous collective in a decidedly non-musical way. In 2015, he had only rapped in public a few times when, a few minutes after taking a tab of acid, he discovered a longtime friend had died. The verse he immediately wrote and recorded ended up on “DNA,” one of the most wrenching songs on Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside. That verse benefits from its evident lack of polish, as if he’s a mere conduit for the memories that come flooding back, his pain literalized by the vocal’s yelping, pleading energy.
Smith has spent the decade since “DNA” tinkering in full view of his audience. At first—as on Twothousand Nakteen and 3000nakteen, both released in 2019—that animated delivery was in service of a nervy, aggressive style that an Odd Future listener in 2013 might have imagined for the future of the group. Over the next several years, Smith’s records retained that confrontational edge, even as he sunk deeper into beats’ pockets and leaned on pitch-shifted vocals to balance out his mixes. His first of two records in 2023, Free Pops FR, suggested a more relaxed pose might be in store; Stand Alone Stuntman, released on Halloween, more than reversed that trajectory. Smith sounds, on the latter album, like he’s leapt out of a burning car to grab you by the lapels and scream.
NAK, his latest (and, at 32 minutes, by far his longest) album, sounds as if it could have been made by another artist entirely. While there are thematic concerns that date back to “DNA,” here Smith makes a show of being in, rather than out of control. He’s mostly left behind the serrated internet rap of the early 2010s for the milieu that Earl has also entered, one occupied by MIKE, Navy Blue, and their contemporaries. But where those artists stake their music on diaristic writing, even Smith’s most personal verses here seem to have been sanded into perfect meters, as if the truth can only come out once you’ve been hypnotized into revealing it.
The repetition on NAK lands somewhere between rap that’s conventional but hook-forward and rap that’s truly experimental. The sense that something eerie is going on creeps in early: The second song, “NO ACT,” is coiled around a single rhyme and a handful of structuring phrases. The formal rigidity is set against a drawled delivery and intrusive images of death. On the next track, Smith seems to have exorcised that baggage—until you realize the accounts of emotional triumph are being buried, in his quick, staccato flow, alongside things that are much more banal. At the album’s conclusion, on the daydreamlike “RIP 3917,” Smith inverts this trick, underlining the beauty of his departed loved ones’ memories by tying them to sheer, superficial joy. “I want a Maybach, I don’t want to rent it” is treated with the tenderness and care that he uses elsewhere to comfort those who worry their sins have made them irredeemable.
Even when he drones, Smith refuses to be dull. NAK is packed with so many rhythmic ideas as to seem hyperactive, no matter how muted the voice itself. There is an irrepressible compulsion to move forward, never heard more clearly than on “FRANCES.” Through a drumless string loop, he raps about the urgent, totalizing need to make money and in the name of his father, whose incarceration hangs over the album like a thick fog, all with the poise of someone who knows he’s got the dials tuned, finally, to the exact frequencies he needs.
