Duwap Kaine is a bored teenager raised on a steady diet of memes, cartoons, Atlanta street rap, and the warbles and slurred words of Almighty So era Chief Keef, maybe the weirdest of the Chicago drill forefather’s first wave. Now 19, he was barely old enough to attend high school when his AutoTune drenched loosies first took off on SoundCloud. His 2018 mixtape Underdog is foundational to anyone immersed in airy SoundCloud rap—Lil Tecca, SoFaygo, and more consider him an influence—despite the fact that it’s a continuous stream of disjointed thoughts. He comes from Savannah, Georgia, but his music doesn’t have a particular setting. On spacey and blown-out beats, he goes over his everyday hobbies: driving his whip over the speed limit, buying new designer jeans, and securing and smoking weed like it’s a basic necessity.
If you were to listen to a single Duwap Kaine song, it might just sound like a tone deaf dude in a broom closet delivering a bunch of half-assed punchlines. He infamously said, “Family Guy I’m Peter,” on “Outside,” and 12 months later not a single person knows what it means. But the best way to experience Duwap Kaine is to click play on his SoundCloud page; eventually, it’ll unexpectedly put you into a trance like a weed edible.
His latest mixtape After the Storm should be digested similarly—you just let it run and mark the timestamps of your favorite moments. I would note the first minute of “Ludacris,” where Duwap coos (with way too much reverb), “Dance wit’ me,” over an instrumental that sounds like being slingshotted through a portal or when he picks the most petty reason to be annoyed by the girl he’s with on “25 Dollar Fanta”: “Hate this bitch she keep askin’ what my sign is.” There’s also the entirety of “The Benjamin Franklin Love Story,” a heart melting love ballad to 100 dollar bills made up of AutoTune wails cranked up to chaotic levels. It’s a tactic he picked up from Keef who embraced his lack of traditional melodic ability by emphasizing missed notes and messiness.
A few of After the Storm’s production choices can snap you out of the daze. The back to back run of drill influenced beats on “Backseat” and “No AutoTune 3” doesn’t quite work, and the hypnotic lull of the mixtape can also drag. When he’s being less playful with AutoTune, it might even put you to sleep, especially if he isn’t saying anything interesting.
Yet the more you listen to the mixtape, those punchlines and lyrics that you previously thought were insignificant begin to stick in your brain. On “Circus,” he conversationally raps, “Baby, let’s chill and watch this Netflix episode/Have you ever seen the movie Dope? I think it’s cool, lеt’s put it on,” and you’ll probably breeze right by it on your first listen. But the further you plunge into the Duwap Kaine experience, mundane moments like this somehow become hilarious in their uneventfulness.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
