If the Mob Figaz rapper Husalah had a superpower it would be his self-confidence. It oozes from an open wound that also bleeds depression and survivor’s remorse; the whole point of his music would seem to be to unbandage and give it air. But it’s been so long since he released new music that Husalah followers—mostly hip-hop fans throughout the Bay Area, along with a faithful few elsewhere—have gotten used to feeling nostalgic. It’s not the kind of complicated reckoning with the past that has become common in a culture of comebacks and reissues, but something more basic—more like, Hey, remember Husalah?
Husalah’s last album was 2007’s Huslin’ Since Da ’80s, a sophomore record that cleaned up the meandering roughness of his mixtapes and found him peering back at a life in the streets. Now, after a pair of 2017 comeback singles comes a new album called H. It’s the first Husalah has released since spending five years in federal prison on a drug charge, and the first since his good friend and spiritual counterpart the Jacka was murdered on an Oakland street in 2015. In that time, hip-hop’s poles have reversed several times over, and H is tinged with the creeping feeling that music has become a lonely place of refuge for Hus. Perched atop his own little mountain of Bay Area rap, he sounds like a man preaching out one side of his mouth and shrieking party raps out the other. He hasn’t changed a bit.
The major upshot of Husalah’s radical self-confidence is that he has always sounded unafraid to do fun, weird things with street rap. It helps that he has always been a hell of a rapper: smart and dexterous enough to be a capital-L lyricist, goofy and experimental enough to never seem out of pocket doing something gonzo. But on record Husalah’s most endearing quality might be that he sounds like a guy in love with music. On H he swaggers over a swinging banda sample (“Mi Encanta”), raps at length in blustering but capable Spanish (“Mi Encanta,” “Bad Young Thang”), channels dancehall and reggae, delivers an interlude-like R&B floater (“Million Miles”), and churns out the type of gaudy, emotional hooks that can come only from equal parts pain and a total lack of self-consciousness.
With “M.O.B.,” the 2017 comeback and return-to-form single that presaged this new album, Husalah has crafted one of the best songs in his catalog, a rattling dose of hyphy adrenaline that transforms him into a shit-talking Hulk. “They say, ‘Husalah, would you please stop beastin’?’/I couldn’t give a shit I keep goin’ for no reason,” he gasps in his hilarious, breathy shriek. (Try this record at the gym, on a run, or in the middle of a dead-end task, and you might find yourself suddenly at the finish line.) “Humpin’” is smoother but equally fun and just as bitterly barked. (The title applies mostly to a panel of subwoofers, but also the party and the women that surround Husalah.) In the slick creeper “Bad Young Thang,” our star channels the smooth-toned crassness of Mac Dre. It’s not the only moment that feels like calculated Bay Area torch-carrying: The sole features on H are a pair of appearances from rappers that were also a part of Mob Figaz, the hyperlocal Bay Area rap crew intertwining aggressive street rap and pensive spirituality that graduated Husalah and the Jacka as its biggest stars. Fittingly, “Keep Mobbin’,” featuring a posthumous Jacka verse, sounds like it could have been pulled from a group mixtape recorded more than a decade ago.
If those are the raucous good times, H is just as full of reflective depression and PTSD repackaged as wise, rethink-the-system self-help. “Protect Your Soul” interpolates the chorus to Sade’s “Bulletproof Soul” word for word, flipping the cynical breakup prediction—“I know the end before the story’s been told”—into a hardened street anthem about death. “Second Time Around” packages a set of life stories—a baby born to an addict, a regretful street soldier, a struggling sex worker—into a song so patently emotional that it’s almost maudlin.
Album closer “Pray 4 You” is a clunky banger released many years ago—quintessential Husalah, but not so essential to the album. It’s not the only track that feels rough, if charming, next to the more polished standouts. H’s comeback doubles as a kind of time capsule, and after so many years away, you can hardly blame him for wanting to pack in as much as possible.
