You can’t passively listen to $ilkmoney. His songs rip through speakers like alien chestbursters, announcing his arrival with blasts of noise or pavement-cracking bass. Then there’s the voice. $ilk raps with a growling sneer, stuffing syllables into every available space. He issues screeds about the cycles of history and Black radical thought in a commanding boom, raspy from a never-ending chain of baseball-bat-sized spliffs. Imagine Xzibit kicking down a door, pupils dilated from a hero’s dose of mushrooms, rapping about subliminal messaging in soda commercials, and you’ve got a decent grasp on the giddy intensity of a $ilkmoney album.
The Richmond, Virginia rapper’s latest, WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE ONCE THE LEAVES DRY UP AND FRUITS NO LONGER BEAR?, breaks the three-year silence that came after the dust settled on 2022’s incendiary I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. On that album, $ilk rapped with a devil-may-care urgency, excoriating the myriad methods of exploitation wielded by our corporate overlords. He cannonballed into Khalil Blu’s subwoofer-crushing beats, crafting an acid tab masterpiece of esoteric philosophy, biting social commentary, and pure, capital-R rapping. He hasn’t lost a step: WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE keeps his signature storminess intact while seeking new contours to his breathless style.
$ilk’s calling card is his verbal pyrotechnics, landing tongue-twisting haymakers like E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap. “I was supposed to get some pussy tonight/Put your mouth on a check you couldn’t cash and ended up booking a flight/And TSA let me by with the tool cooked in a pie,” he raps on “Pneumonoultramicroscpopic(nobody)silicovolcanoniosis,” eking out the last words like a dying gasp. He’s fascinated by the malleability of language, stretching rhyme schemes to their breaking point. On “A Whale Is Only as Blue as You Say It Is, So, It’s 2,” he pirouettes through the couplet, “Hello, beloved, you’ve uncovered what’s under the rubble/Discovered what once was covered in covers but couldn’t get out of your own way because of your own stubborn.” You could press play on any song and be bowled over by at least three similarly vertiginous passages. Over the thunderous, slow-burning groove of “The Jury Duty Seafood Boil Bag From the Lyfe Jennings Paperwork Party,” he gives insight into his writing process, boldly proclaiming his ability to mimic Kendrick Lamar’s pronunciation of the letter “T” and executing it perfectly for the next few bars. $ilkmoney’s songs are the musings of an overactive, scarily inquisitive mind, and they’re also love letters to the craft.
Rather than simply repeating the wrecking-ball momentum and fist-shaking incredulity of his previous work, WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE takes a fairly intimate view of the usually enigmatic $ilk. He appears freer to explore other parts of himself, charting more peaks and valleys instead of his usual maxed-out energy. He’s constantly interrogating existence—on “First I Give Up, Then I Give In, Then I Give All,” he laments how “things are moving fast/Some days feel like years, others just pass/Some days I ain’t here.” The album’s recurring theme of solitude makes $ilk’s regular use of non-sequiturs and shifting points of view feel more like the stuff of anxious internal ruminations. On “The $400 Cheeseburger From the Window Shopper Video Was Just a Big Mac -______-,” he sits alone in his room, rubbing his eyes and chewing on shrooms, trying to figure out why he “woke up today feeling less valuable than [he] did the day before yesterday.” A pack of loud beats, a blank notebook, and a pound of weed may not be the cure for loneliness, but they at least offer a release valve.
Private reflections spiral into thoughts about systems and how he fits within them. $ilk is dubious of it all: monogamy, major labels, generative AI—twice he recalls the digital minstrelsy of fictional rapper FN Meka, and at one point he vows to “single-handedly take down the singularity.” As WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE stares unblinkingly at a bleak present and unknown future, $ilk proposes a kind of acceptance: Learn who you are amid all this chaos, and you might figure out how to fight back. This isn’t an optimistic or pessimistic record; it’s realistic. Each day presents new headwinds, and it’s up to you to summon the courage to push through. His daydreams about placing a pistol on the table during record contract negotiations on “We Snuck the Hammer in the Tunnel and Din Een Need To” are extreme, but he’s right in understanding that sometimes the response to brute force is brute force.
The album’s production mirrors $ilk’s more nuanced approach, though it’d be a stretch to call WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE quiet or forgiving. Drums occupy space even when they’re minimal, just enough to tether $ilk’s rhythmic meanderings. Much of the blown-out ’80s soul and Weather Channel jazz soundscapes come from frequent collaborator Khalil Blu, who’s credited on 10 of 15 tracks, including five co-productions with $ilk himself. Mutant Academy’s Sycho Sid provides the beats for “Fuuuuck, Baby. You’re Just So Sexy When You’re Terrified” and “There Are Hills and Mountains Between Us, Always Something to Get Over,” both of which bend that group’s bubbly, soul-sample psychedelia toward the more intense, candy-flipping style $ilk prefers. The mixes are loud but cogent; each frequency pushes to the ceiling, always threatening to bury $ilk’s voice but somehow leaving a decent margin around it.
The album takes a while to unpack; its song titles are riddles posed by an especially online bridge troll, and each cryptic verse seems to twist through a hundred different ideas. There’s a strange mysticism to this music, with $ilk playing the part of psychotropic philosopher, carrying knowledge retrieved from the depths of consciousness. His densely layered thoughts perpetually shift from macro to micro, touching on everything from theoretical physics to his skincare routine. But it’s all important to examine, $ilk seems to say, regardless how unpleasant. They haven’t yet invented a way out that’s not through, but it’s worth taking a few detours.
