You’re at a club. Maybe Miami. The DJ has been spinning the same Ozuna song for what seems like forever. The lights are so dim and the haze is so thick that you can’t see five feet in front of you on the dancefloor. You have conversations that you can only remember pieces of, and fleeting thoughts that slip in and out between horny nonsense and life-affirming questions. Drinks keep coming, but you have no idea if someone else is eating the bill, or if you’re gonna be hit with a fat Zelle request the next day.
That’s pretty much what it’s like to listen to xaviersobased’s Xavier, which isn’t really dance rap for the party, but dance rap about being at the party for too long. In spirit, it’s disorienting music that falls somewhere between Metro Zu’s psychedelic kick-back tunes and Max B’s nights of navigating local rap fame off sips of Grand Cru straight from the bottle. That seems to be Xav’s way of handling the uneasy transition from fucking around with regional rap trends on the internet to a major label debut on Atlantic, which is more expansive and polished than anything he’s ever made. I understand that probably sounds like a bad thing: He’s been one of the best and most polarizing underground stars of the last few years because of mixtapes—my personal favorites are the DJ Rennessey-hosted Keep It Goin Xav and the mega-fried Who Are You?—that overloaded on tossed-off ideas and distorted rhythms. But, for the most part, it’s still Xavier cracking dick jokes and threading together too many microgenres to count.
So that means there’s no industry-mandated Don Toliver feature or BNYX beat, and no obvious interference with his chaos. It’s just a collage of all the influences that have powered Xavier’s music all along, blown up for the maximalist style of commercial rap. The relatively epic “iPhone 16”—almost four minutes long with multiple beat switch-ups—feels like it has the blockbuster ambition of a Travis Scott song. But with each handclap-driven shift, he gradually flips it into his take on one of Certified Trapper’s bedroom recordings. That Milwaukee lowend sauce is in “Packs Gone,” too, where he buries the kind of ass-shaking commands you might find on Big Frank’s “Eat Her Up” and Myaap’s “Wham” inside of a near-ambient fog. The intensity of “Zelle You” is probably the closest he gets to matching the fury of other marquee albums of his generation, like Jump Out and Rest in Bass, until the last minute when the beat fades out, then fades back into something that sounds like a distorted leak on a YouTube page that just got hit with a takedown notice.
It’s a pretty cool and self-indulgent way to blow a label bag. The self-produced “Harajuku” is like jerk snares dropped over Klein’s guitar fuzz. He channels his Upper West Side roots on “Minute” by deconstructing the kind of unholy club-drill bounce you might find on an M Row or Mdot 59 single into a noisy Bushwick warehouse banger. On “Dat Shit Fr,” he speed-runs through Keef flows, capturing a pinch of Sosa’s rawness, especially when the mic picks up the thump of him smacking himself on the chest. There’s another big beat switch-up on “Tony Hawk” and Xav downplays the pageantry by spitting the kind of out-of-pocket punchlines you might expect from Flint’s Rio Da Yung OG and RMC Mike: “In the strip club with a hard-on.” I respect the honesty.
But Xavier is more than just a tastemaker with a SoundCloud account. I think about A$AP Rocky—before all the brand deals and magazine covers—and the way his entire worldview felt like it was in the music: He worshipped DJ Screw as much as Dipset, was as interested in Harlem drug dealers as Downtown skaters. That’s what Xavier’s music has, too: the kind of hyper-curious New York swag that could only come from there. Music that’s composed of a thousand stray fragments, while still having a beating heart.
That mentality is present even in the stuff that doesn’t work. Xav uses his new connections to recruit the freestyle maniac, Rio, to do his thing on a washed-out Yung Sherman beat, but it’s clunky and forced. (It is hilarious that Carti announced himself to the wider hip-hop world on Die Lit by having Nicki Minaj rap on a Pi’erre instrumental, while Xav gets Rio to rap about raw sex on some Sad Boys shit.) And on “Give It Up,” Xavier and OsamaSon don’t have an interesting take on the boom of ravey free car music, so I’d rather just listen to Jaeychino or ST6 Jodyboof. Better is the Skrillex and Dylan Brady-produced bonus track “Party at My Place.” Sure, it’s a very early-2010s, sponsored-by-a-streetwear-brand move, but the combination of explosive synths and buffering vocals that sound like he’s working with a broken talkbox finds a bridge between the accessibility he’s looking for and the sensory overload that keeps his roots intact.
Xavier is toned down a smidge, but it’s him. And in a mainstream rap landscape where everyone’s on podcasts doing rap-is-dead discourse and stars are racing to become the next Trump puppet, it’s refreshing to see an album completely on its own wavelength inching its way toward the upper echelon of rap. There’s a reality where Xavier rapping about shopping at skate shops on Canal Street or overthinking interactions with bottle girls over the “Wheel Man” claps that sound like drowned-out reggaeton could get as much attention as a Kai Cenat stream. It’s even possible that there’s a future where the most important thing about rap is still the music.
