All the way through 2017, Shy Glizzy’s voice has been at the center of an unexpected Washington, D.C. rap hit. GoldLink’s “Crew” snowballed into a smash as the months warmed, and it’s Glizzy’s verse that cuts the song in half, interrupting an otherwise sinewy and droning R&B jam with a jumpy giddiness. The eager opening of his verse—“Hey! Nice to meet/I’m Young Jefe, who you be?”—is the type you brace for all along, the obvious “this is my favorite part” of one of the year’s happiest surprises. Of course, it wasn’t an introduction so much as a mainstream moment of arrival. Glizzy has been at or near the center of D.C. hip-hop since at least 2014, and “Crew” felt more like lending a hand than climbing a social ladder. But where GoldLink burrowed into D.C. music tradition for a statement album that blipped his city back into the mainstream hip-hop consciousness, Glizzy channels the pervasive sounds of Atlanta trap for his own contemporary D.C. soundtrack.
Glizzy’s latest mixtape, Quiet Storm, is an ambitious 18 songs, but he’s successfully designed it to glide by. Almost every beat is in a softly-synthed, languid trap style, and Glizzy is rarely as jumpy as he appears on “Crew.” Instead, he hosts the project as the center of attention, a pop artist with a full arsenal of graceful melody to match the tone. Go-to Atlanta producers like TM88, Goose, and Yung Lan dot the landscape with tracks that sound smooth but not slick, and often take shape out of minor key atmospherics. Glizzy uses the same sounds to channel opulent romance (“Blow a Bag”) and morbid existentialism (“Take Me Away”), sometimes on the same song. “Get Away” is a versatile escapist anthem: crime chase and sentimental runaway at once.
Glizzy has also rekindled his surefire working relationship with the Atlanta producer Zaytoven, whose keyboard twinkles on “One Day” might echo some of his previous productions (see Future’s “Peacoat”), but remain vital enough to appear on both this album and the producer’s own recent solo outing. For all the Atlanta stars Zaytoven’s beats have canvassed, Glizzy might treat them the best. He slips into the first verse with droning couplets and jumps out of the second to yelp out his bona fides. For the chorus, he churns hope into a mantra, promising and reminding himself of the purpose of his grind: “All my niggas gon’ ball one day.”
Besides the smartly streamlined curation of beats, Quiet Storm also folds in carefully doled out features: Trey Songz carries a swaggering hook on “Dope Boy Magic” and Dave East punches into “Get It Again” with a relentless string of brags. As the de facto leader and concentrated star power of the D.C. crew Glizzy Gang, Shy shares space with 3 Glizzy and 30 Glizzy on “Haters Anthem” for a track that greets envy with biting inspirationalism. But there’s a sour side here too. In September, 30 Glizzy was shot and killed in Baltimore, and his brief appearance on the Quiet Storm tracklist prefaces a heartfelt tribute at the end of the album. That closer, “Take Me Away,” is dangerously morose, edging into depressive suicidal thoughts as Glizzy caps off each chorus line with an open invitation for death. Glizzy sounds both like an open-wound and depressed shut-in here. “It’s a war started outside, don’t wanna talk about it,” he yelps. For all the giddiness Glizzy carries onto many of his songs, he’s never been more endearing than this, wallowing in justifiable street survivalism. More than ever, he sounds like the open heart of his city.
