Except for being signed to the same label, the rappers OMB Peezy and Sherwood Marty seemed entirely unconnected until a few weeks ago, when they released their first collaborative single and announced a mixtape called Young & Reckless—a sudden, random move that smacks of industry matchmaking. Peezy is a prodigious and pyrotechnic young rapper from Alabama who moved to Sacramento as a child, but well after a heavy Southern drawl had taken hold of his nasally voice. He’s spent the last couple years molding his singular twang into both of his hometown contexts: Bay Area funk and Cash Money nostalgia. Marty, on the other hand, is from Baton Rouge and channels something more broadly regional in the form of fluid trap. Here, they’re both steeped in the same slurry Auto-Tune, and they play off each other’s strengths, even if a full tracklist sometimes reads less like a gelling duo than a ping-pong game of track features.
Young & Reckless feels like a come-up vehicle for Marty and a catalog build-out for Peezy, who burst onto the scene already in stride in 2016, but, besides a string of stunning loose songs, only has a short EP to his name. He raps about a life of street violence with a yappy drawl and a thousand-yard stare, by turns snarling and somber in a despondent fog of the after-effects. On the lead single, “Crash Out,” Peezy tumbles into the first verse in an immediate rage, prowling for vengeance but never numb to the PTSD (“My first mission won’t leave my mind”) or dread (“Mama pray for me, prison ain’t the place for me”) that accompanies. His voice is metallic and icy, and there’s a slithering elegance to the way his lyrics bundle into conversational knots. But because of the bouncy pacing of his register, Peezy’s flow can sound erratic, and that he’s so often leveraging a threat reinforces the pummeling effect of his delivery. It’s no surprise that he’s the main draw throughout, or that “Crash Out,” the same type of woozy Southern funk-trap he built his breakout on, seems to belong entirely to him.
Next to Peezy, Marty sounds like a slack crooner, flatter and less piercing by comparison. But because of his sing-songy baritone he’s got a grounding presence on Young & Reckless that paints his counterpart as the exclamation point. Still, Marty is more than capable of carrying a song himself, and many of these tracks sound like they belonged to him first, sometimes to the point of casting the other as a phone-in. (That goes both ways.) On the generically flaunting “I’m the Shit,” Marty’s the one that fills up the cavernous shell of a beat, not just with predictable brags but also with his own scurrying melody that bleeds from verse to hook. Peezy is there to punch a quick appearance near the end. The opposite is true on the organ-laced “Lights Out,” where Peezy takes the lead on a cathartically told-you-so chorus and sinister main verse that renders Marty an afterthought before the track closes. Sometimes they’re more in lockstep, like when Peezy’s nasally vocals echo Marty’s barking chorus with matching ad-libs on the menacing “Ready.” On the final two tracks, “Better Dayz” and “Ride Wit It,” they trade songs about gloom and paranoia, slinking into each other’s shared street nightmares and grief.
More than anything, Young & Reckless sounds like a pair of disparate rappers honing their voices, acting as one another’s pacesetters even if they’re running different races. Either of them could command this amount of space on his own, but there’s an obvious relief in sharing the spotlight; lowering the stakes of songwriting gives each the freedom to say less.
