In a world where plenty of rap elders are content to roll out unchallenging albums to steadfast fanbases, Roc Marciano still knows how to hold your head underwater. Few rappers boast a style so enveloping and detail-rich, every verse stuffed with taunts, velour victories, and nagging regrets rendered in granular, Gordon Parks-like radiance. New albums from Hempstead’s veteran rapper-producer unfold like dispatches from a jet-setting uncle popping in for a visit: His tales scan as ridiculous, even a bit silly, but that just makes them more thrilling. He brings the same watchful eye to the loops he raps over as he does to the Patek on his wrist or the shiesty goons “fertilized with horse poo” for botching a hit, all (mostly) without spinning his wheels. After some high-profile collaborations, he’s back behind the mic and the MPC for 656, his new studio album, which pushes into the sweet spot between the analog and the digital.
It’s the first album he’s fully produced for himself since 2013’s Marci Beaucoup, and doesn’t stray far from his patented bare-bones chops and loops. Presentation is the biggest difference here: Many of these songs have an electronic sheen to them, the type of haze associated with an unprocessed beat ripped straight from the machine it was made on. Instead of sounding rushed or cheap, it adds an extra layer of menace to Marci’s gaudy underworld. The organ, drum fill, and scant horn line on opener “Trick Bag” march with a distorted crunch; the synths powering “Childish Things” sound sourced from some long-lost Super Mario 64 Bowser dungeon. Other flourishes feel lightly touched up, tweaked until they’re slightly lopsided: Take the bass strums on “Prince & Apollonia,” so fuzzy they land like percussion, or the subtle robotic metronome leading the swelling arrangement of “Yves St. Moron.” This is a different shade of minimalism for Marci, harkening to the gutter ’90s-era beatmaking represented by the dingy floppy disk on the album cover.
A good chunk of the album bears these synthetic seams, but the rest further refines the diamond-cut aesthetic and elastic rhyme schemes Marci’s made his name on since the early 2010s. “I’m not an actor, but I’m in character,” he says near the beginning of “Hate Is Love,” keeping it real while continuing to blur fact and fiction. Mise-en-scène remains crucial to maintaining the grandiosity of the Marci experience—his reference pool and peerless lifestyle raps simultaneously enhance each other. When he drops an “Ain’t no Tracee Ellis Rosses up at Ross” in between luxury colognes and cars on “Vanity,” the zinger juxtaposes the Girlfriends star with a hapless chad attempting to “trauma bond, crying inside the Prada store.” The point: Shop wherever you want—it may be on you, but it’s in him. What the late Ka did to build resolve against the unforgiving brutalities of Brownsville, Marci combines with the flair of a Bond villain and contempt for anyone attempting to copy his mold.
And Marci remains an S-class shit talker, dressing down opponents with nothing more than his silver tongue. Every song is a daisy chain of vignettes that bleed into each other while keeping the same rhyme scheme. One of the most brutal comes about a quarter of the way into “Yves St. Moron,” which starts out grateful for success (“Had 360 waves on my head for every brush that I had with death/But not even death can make me acquiesce”) before digging at the competition. “Niggas think Avirex is a flex/It ain’t been fresh since the days of Wreckx-n-Effect,” he snarls, shredding the iconic leather jackets the way Jay-Z did basketball jerseys on The Black Album. Marci’s taste skews more eclectic, and hilarious, rhyming “Cactus Plant Flea Market joggers” with Carhartt Work in Progress. He’s had to cut off so many flings, you might meet an amputee “missing hands and feet like some damn Marines.” Colorful quotables spill out of stanzas so frequently, they can be easy to take for granted.
Though Marci’s wary of biters, he knows how to share the spotlight with those he deems worthy. Errol Holden, whom Marci executive-produced on his blistering 2025 breakthrough Mulberry Silk Road, is 656’s only feature, and the Harlem rapper doesn’t squander a bar on “Rain Dance” and “Trapeze.” Like Marci, Holden is another cavalier New York boy blending the exquisite and the grimy, but he comes at it with a whirlwind delivery that’s faster and riskier. Flashes of Cam’ron and Marci’s old mentor Busta Rhymes abound on “Trapeze,” where visions of medium-rare burgers and crinkle-cut fries rub up against solitary drug deals that end in hundred-year sentences: “I am your tour guide from the era of Buster Browns and Florsheim/Clean as floor shine/Scream to devil, Aaron Neville high pitch.” Both his verses fade out before they truly end, signaling just how much more Holden has in store. It’s clear Marci sees him as a kindred spirit keeping a certain sect of East Coast hip-hop alive. But while the indie rap renaissance he helped shepherd is showing no signs of slowing down, 656 proves nobody innovates like the originator.
