Detroit’s Bruiser Brigade collective, led by Danny Brown, got their name from a hidden team power-up in a video game. In the 2004 title X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, you create a four-person unit from a wide selection of characters to defeat the titular villain. The name of one of those teams—composed of mutants Wolverine, Rogue, Colossus, and Juggernaut—appealed to Brown and a handful of members, and it eventually stuck. Bruiser Brigade has since proven to be an apt name for the collective, especially in a world where Brown regularly leaks songs via the game-oriented streaming service Twitch. Their music is confrontational and challenging, obliterating the line between hard-bitten street raps and hazy abstraction until they all become points on the same Cerebro map.
TV62, the group’s latest compilation and the first to be released through the recently founded Bruiser Brigade Records, funnels this formula through the group’s first stab at a loose concept project. A fuzzy ad for WGPR-TV—a Detroit TV station that was also the first Black-owned television station in the United States—opens the album before Danny and a handful of Bruiser Brigade members are heard telling jokes and laughing in the background. The songs don’t have a narrative throughline, but the intent is clear: the Bruisers are as Detroit as Rockports and Cartiers, and they’re here to rap through any wall you put in front of them. There are a few surprises and left turns, but TV62 is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl.
Across the project, each member firmly establishes their purpose within the squad. J.U.S. and Fat Ray are the hard-nosed soldiers giving clear-eyed status reports. Newcomer Bruiser Wolf uses a disarming amount of punchlines to portray the drug game in vivid, cartoonish detail. ZelooperZ’s voice shapeshifts from bar to bar, keeping his songs unpredictable yet shackled to the ground. Producers Black Noi$e, SKYWLKR, Raphy, and J.U.S., among others, provide a diverse palette of boom-bap, mid-tempo dusty loops, and even a variation on the Detroit street rap someone like Babyface Ray would float on. All roads lead back to Danny, who’s the glue binding these seemingly disparate elements together.
That’s a staggering amount of voices and personalities crammed into 16 tracks, but it never become chaotic or overbearing. The baton is passed frequently enough to give the project a brisk pace. Eagle-eyed fans will notice that Dopehead and Kash The Kushman—two Bruiser Brigade members featured prominently on 2018’s Reign Supreme—are absent from TV62. Old and new members alike pick up the slack, elevating the project to more than just a pile of loosies cobbled together. ZelooperZ uses both ends of his vocal register to churn the maximum amount of personality out of his one song and one guest verse. Bruiser Wolf, J.U.S., and Fat Ray, meanwhile, each appear on four songs as either a headliner or guest. (All three have released full-length projects through the label within the last five months.)
The affect and wordplay that Bruiser Wolf sharpened on his stellar label debut, Dope Game Stupid, contrasts nicely with the weirder flourishes of Black Noi$e and Gulley’s production. Fat Ray, the group’s most traditional rapper, matches the shuffle of a downtempo beat on the standout “Superhero,” where he talks about cracking heads like Pepsi cans and says he has more bars than Maryland rapper Xanman. J.U.S.’s storytelling continues to impress, too—he compares life to a video game on the self-produced “Story Mode”; and on “Friends or Foe,” he stuffs several vignettes into roughly a minute over producer dream beach’s chirping synths. Though nearly every featured artist has at least one song that could go, the concise runtimes keep the action moving.
Naturally, Danny Brown’s songs connect all corners of TV62. He’s larger than life like Bruiser Wolf, isn’t afraid to modulate his voice like ZelooperZ, has the anecdotal eye of J.U.S., and the stoic “don’t cross me” nature of Fat Ray. He adopts styles and powers with the ease of the X-Man Rogue, attacking different beats with varying skill sets. His voice skips across the production on “Dylon” and “Welfare,” stretching to the elastic heights of Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the latter. Brown’s four tracks embrace the whiplash in tone, from manic to somber, that fueled early work like XXX and Old; but because they’re so spread out, it’s even more surprising to hear him squawking like a character from Chowder about trapping on Greyhound buses immediately after J.U.S.’s straight-faced listing of goals on “Icewood Type Beat.”
Falling in line with the album’s intro and interspersed skits of laughter, TV62 approximates the casual chaos of late-night channel surfing. Bruiser Brigade’s chemistry and skill propel the project beyond the sum of its parts, though, standing as the closest thing to a statement the group has ever released. “Everybody want us all to win. Everybody working toward the same efforts,” Bruiser Wolf recently told Dad Bod Rap Pod of the group’s endgame. The only way they intend to get to the next level is together.
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