California producer klwn cat and New York rapper Sunmundi each inhabit the intersection where the experimental reflection of Ka and Navy Blue collide with the minimal charm of Roc Marciano and Preservation. cat cites Navy and J Dilla as influences on his style, but the beats he’s been making since 2022’s sphynx, vol. 1 have matured beyond homage, becoming liquid and enveloping. Meanwhile, Sunmundi’s flow, which started out with a strictly metered delivery, has slowly loosened to match his melancholic prose, earning shoutouts from billy woods. After a handful of collaborations, they both emerge with energy and talent to burn on Lived and Born, their first full-length together. Here, they produce and rap like they’re digging themselves out of shallow graves with their teeth.
Lived and Born flirts with ideas of reincarnation and digs through Sunmundi’s past, present, and future to grasp at the tether between them. But even when the ruminations feel inescapable, he blazes through them with the precision—and triple the urgency—of Long Island rapper-producer Lungs. When, near the end of early standout “Capitulation,” he says “Happiness nowadays just don’t hit the same,” the thought is stacked with playground memories, the healing qualities of brown butter pierogies, and a bottomless appetite for each new chapter of life. “Late-stage capitulation is a motherfuckin’ sonuvabitch!” he says in one echoing gulp of breath, channeling the time-conscious frenzy of Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. klwn cat’s flutes and soft drum rolls trill in the background, giving Sunmundi’s words the weight of biblical edicts.
That’s the core of the pair’s chemistry: cat’s mournful loops split the difference between the gothic horror of Ingmar Bergman and the smoky ambience of film noir, while Sunmundi’s bars scurry through them, frantic but determined. Over the rumbling bass and violins of “New Pavement,” he’s piecing together head-busting aphorisms (“The only way to make sense of this world was to fabricate it”) while struggling to find the strength to breathe. On the sparkling “Answering the Call,” he’s swinging his feet from the spaceship and taking comfort in how much he doesn’t know. Sunmundi’s level of certainty in the world and in himself shifts from song to song—on the bittersweet “Everything Is Everything,” he switches from hopeful to despondent on a dime—but cat’s soundscapes ground him in the present.
As often as Lived and Born trudges knowingly through existential crisis, the songs retain a youthful fervency that keeps them out of shadow. Depression is never too far away, but cat and Sunmundi refuse to be defeatists. Closing tracks “I Lived” and “Harbingers” explicitly make this case, their gleaming instrumentals unfurling like sunrises as Sunmundi keeps pace. “Lick the wound if you bleeding, but don’t develop a taste for your own trauma,” he says on the latter. Many in the indie rap lane are sorting through trauma in search of a more edifying tomorrow; for cat and Sunmundi, reincarnation means sculpting new lives from the ashes of their old ones.
