It would be nice to resist the reference points, but Lungs offers them so readily. When he was in the fifth grade, he told the blog RhymeBeat, his mother gave him a birthday present: the Fugees’ The Score. The rapper-producer, who grew up between New York City and Long Island, says the first time he listened to that record, he was running a 103 degree fever, hallucinating that one side of his bunk bed opened onto a vast desert, and if he rolled to the other side, a jungle. When the fever broke, he logged onto a file-sharing platform called Frostwire and downloaded two totems of Def Jux’s apex: Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein and Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth.
Those seemingly incongruent schools of hip-hop—a moodiness that aspires to spiritual awakening, atonality that quickly resolves from noise into signal—would become twin pillars of his style. Since the beginning of quarantine, Lungs has been joined by fellow New York-based rappers like AKAI SOLO, Fatboi Sharif, and his collaborator on the Another Planet series, Phiik, in forming the spine of a new scene that sounds like it could only have emerged “since the beginning of quarantine.” Where New York’s non-drill underground had been dominated by rappers like MIKE and Navy Blue, whose insouciant deliveries mask a constant inward drive toward an improved self, this cadre seemed to snap upright with raps that are muscular, verbose, and agitated with the cacophonous world outside.
Another Planet 4 is the first full-length installment in the series Phiik and Lungs began in late 2020 and the cleanest distillation yet of their binary star chemistry. While Lungs is the one who admitted an adolescent pirating spree, it’s Phiik who sounds as if he’d be at home on a release schedule next to Aesop Rock or Vordul Mega. His verses are packed just as densely as Lungs’ are, but Phiik maps a route through them, as those Def Jux rappers did, with halting rhythms, onomatopoeia, and the percussive qualities of language. (See especially his verse on “When I Needed Someone”: Fear Factor, a backpack of bugs.) Lungs, by contrast, raps like lines of code flitting across a screen, ceaseless and seamless. Your brain needs time to attune to the sheer amount of information contained in his verses, which can overwhelm on first pass. The effect of these styles together—cousins but not twins—is to build dynamism where there might otherwise be only virtuosity.
And still, the detail comes as a flood. Each rapper’s lyrics are acutely observed. Some images are so rich as to be ethnographic: Phiik’s “45-year-old off-duty cop rocking Dunks,” Lungs’ recollection of a party “out in Suffolk, Italian kids headbutting walls, all bumping Cage/They parents upstairs, fucked up, doing bumps to Jimmy Page/The streets unpaved.” When Lungs drives on the LIE it’s with a “stomach full of bad Perc 30s”; when Phiik imagines a threat from the margins of society, it comes in the form of “overly pissed weirdos in a duster with a hit list.” The sinister figure out of The Matrix or Columbine punctures a porous border between pop culture and what we know as reality. The first lyrics on the album are “Lana Del Rey.” Unk rattles out of speakers and Colin Farrell dives into a phone booth, Steve Irwin dies and Windows 95 boots to life, Vine microcelebrities order drugs on their phone and rappers sound “like James Dolan when he piss,” all this adding up to a simulation that “can’t even run properly, without lags.”
This overload is in psychic step with the production, which is handled entirely by Lungs under his LoneSword pseudonym, and sounds like Operation: Doomsday if it were pieced together on one of those translucent iMacs in a school computer lab. In place of the quiet storm samples pulled from Stretch Armstrong’s record collection are the drumless loops that have dominated New York post-Marcberg, gestures toward jazz, lonely sirens, R&B samples half-heard through apartment walls. But even while Lungs and Phiik tend toward minimalism on a beat-by-beat basis, they eschew it in the aggregate, the album in sequence mimicking a brain as it shuffles through libraries, news feeds, memories.
Though dizzying at first, Another Planet is never quite inscrutable, and in fact traces the outline of a worldview: one that prioritizes basic decency, one that’s afraid of straying too far from the coasts because someone “might try to shoot up Target.” Lungs and Phiik understand not only how to navigate this din, but how to wield it for their own purposes—and how to critique the plausible deniability it grants to those who would rather shrug and move immorally. As Lungs raps on “Death Weapon,” before noting how tidily a New York street cleaves the “yuppies sitting in heated tents” and the unhoused people freezing to death across from them: “I tried to read the verse and couldn’t—there was too many ink blots.”
