TheMIND (real name Zarif Wilder) bides his time floating between two Chicago worlds: He has backing vocals on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and appeared on SaveMoney Crew affiliate’s projects like Joey Purp’s excellent iiiDrops and Noname’s Telefone, and Chance-compatriots Donnie Trumpet and Knox Fortune make appearances on his debut project Summer Camp, which snuck out into the world last June. But he made a name for himself before that, as a member of production collective THEMpeople, producing songs for Mick Jenkins and guesting on his albums (along with other auxiliary members of this scene, Sean Deaux and Saba). It’s an easy-but-accurate comparison to place theMIND in this world: maybe it’s the tone of his voice more than his lyrical content, but he’s this scene’s Frank Ocean.
Summer Camp isn’t Nostalgia, Ultra, though, even though I think it aspires to be, with its vaguely conceptual narrative (songs that play in a car as a couple vacillate between talking and arguing) and snippets of tracks that filter in and out of focus like a dream (or a channel surfer). But its biggest strengths lie elsewhere—theMIND is a gifted producer, and the way he’s constructed this record is less like some alt-R&B throwaway mixtape and more like a cavernous, meandering album.
A whistling tea kettle sets things off on opener “Summer Camp” before the song finds the album’s cushiest groove. A headphone-friendly nocturnal mood, consuming the album like embers around a campfire, is established: “Run through the woods if the rain comes/cover your head ’til the pain numbs/lose it all in the earth, leave your tears in the dirt/fall in love ’til it hurts/we young,” works the same wistful, doomed-young-romance lane Ocean has trafficked in since 2011 (if not recently). It’s not the most subtle stuff, but the pleasures of Summer Camp reside in Wilder’s ability to conjure a mood with his production, then sell the emotion with the most direct line of songwriting.
“Pale Rose” is the single, and it’s less effective, a propulsive, “I Would Die 4 U”-type beat that suffers from a generic, overwrought bridge: “Hey you/right over there/who even loves/who even cares?” It’s the growing pains of a songwriter still trying to reach his final form. On the brisk “In Peace,” an introspective, neo-soul-esque production that would slot nicely onto Jamila Woods’ HEAVN, Wilder hits his deepest nerve: “My granny told me read my Bible/as I start to daydream/I see it all in HD/we’re bigger than they told us we were.” On the Noname-assisted “Only the Beginning,” he adopts a husky, sing-song Isaiah Rashad flow: “I often sweat when haunted nightly by regret like/why I didn’t kill that nigga when my sister told me what he did to her?” He rambles a bit more about his sister, but never hits the detail of what happened to her—he’s yet to develop a songwriter’s storytelling instinct, but he’s attempting to tap into that vein.
Wilder’s gift is to summon some of the magic of guys like Ocean, Rashad, and Chance, but it’s also a curse, because you can more easily chart out how much more maturing he has to do before he can hang with them. All said, Summer Camp is one of the summer’s few surprises, a low-stakes album available for free, the late night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed. If you like Mick Jenkins but wished his songs were a little lighter, or if you want to hear an earnest young Chicago artist find his voice without literally sounding like Chance, theMIND’s Summer Camp is a pleasant place to stop in.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified theMIND as a member of Chance the Rapper’s SaveMoney Crew. It has been amended.
