In the last few years, RealYungPhil’s raps have taken on the effect of that friend who always has a life-affirming conversation with you on the porch outside of a house party. I’m talking the kind of heart-to-heart where you only hear faded murmurs of the music coming from inside whenever the door swings open, and when you go back into the crib, somehow so much time has passed that nearly everyone is gone. This casual pensiveness has been part of Phil’s deadpan punchline rap since at least the early 2020s, when I only knew him as the Connecticut-raised graduate of the litefeet scene with arguably the coolest beat selection in the underground. Ever since the tapped-in Swedish beatmakers—Yung Sherman, Woesum, Gud—in the Sad Boys and Drain Gang orbit started hooking him up with their glassy, near-liturgical instrumentals around 2023’s Victory Music, it’s been pushed to the forefront.
I like Victory Music but not as much as I like the idea of Victory Music. The tape has a celestial glow but it can be one-note, with Phil adding his meditative thoughts and stray flexes to what feels like a beatpack sent over email. It’s more like the kind of cross-Atlantic link-up a fan would dream up if they designed a fantasy rap album (I know I did) than what you’d get if Phil and the Swedish boys were actually feeding off each other. Fortunately, that’s not the case with his new record, until something changes, which feels a lot more collaborative and intentional. Phil steps into their lush world of mystic ambience and in response, they up the tempos a tick to meet his steely East Coast bravado. It makes sense that the album wasn’t only laid down in Connecticut and Los Angeles, but also in Stockholm.
The real-life chemistry is present on “activated”—produced by the trio of Woesum, Stacey, and Eurohead—which kicks off with the sort of celebratory church bells you might hear on a wedding day, supercharged by the crashing 808s I tend to associate with the offshoot of drill popular in the Northeast. That little bit of pop gives Phil a pocket to catch as he strings together his resolute words of motivation: “It ain’t shit that I gain from you losing/And it’s nothing I lose from you winning.” In another life, he’d be writing uplifting Nike slogans. I initially thought “Remote”—which is, hilariously, Adam Sandler’s Click in song form—was overly glacial, until Gud’s sporadic bursts of ticking hi-hats hit like a downpour in the middle of a heatwave. That slight bounce underlines Phil’s optimistic breakthrough. Woesum and Stacey bring a bigger punch to that serene mood on “Sold Out Shows,” where the drums gently rumble like a toy train set. Phil shows out on that beat, too, dusting his verses—in between forgettable raps by UK newcomers Kare and kwes e—with short, recognizable messages (“Sorry I couldn’t get back to you, I had shit I was going through”) that don’t require him to go any deeper.
When Phil isn’t in his Scandinavian bag, the songs are less distinct but his rapping is looser. He drops in a funny Labubu pun on “ayo ksuuvi” and a hoops analogy over the crushed-up glitter of “2x.” On “phila,” warmly produced by Dylvinci, the pitched-up second half ends the album with the hard-earned but surreal perseverance that makes me think about the family holding hands through it all at the end of Claudine. But until something changes is best when all sides of Phil come together, like on “midas touch,” with Gud and Stacey. As Phil flaps his lips and bobs between stunting and wooden confessions (“You won’t believe the shit I seen in just an hour’s time”), the beat layers stuttering handclaps reminiscent of the get lite rhythms Phil grew up on in Connecticut over the atmospheric synths essential to Swedish sadboy rap. It’s a combination that feels airy but simultaneously makes you want to bust out a rhythm with your fist on the table. It’s how I imagine it would be to watch a 2010s Hartford-area house party through a snow globe. This is the RealYungPhil-Stockholm connection in full form.
