“I don’t want to tell you what I’m feeling,” Anysia Kym sings on “Test Your Patience,” and for a while, she might have been talking to us. The first few years of her career were spent playing drums for Blair, a Brooklyn band that braved cramped rehearsal spaces by day and threw shows with heavyweights like Wiki by night. Since departing the group in 2022, she’s lugged her percussive penchant into airy, otherworldly territory—less concerned with fringe rock’s fucked-up realities, and more infatuated with the hazy hypnagogia that strings shabby days together. On 2022’s Soliloquy and 2023’s Pressure Sensitive, she tossed artful alley-oops to the likes of MIKE, Niontay, and Jadasea, setting the table for some of her collaborators’ most psyched-out plays. After years of being a pass-first producer, Truest marks her first foray into pure scoring—solo tracks, only one feature—and shows flashes of a star in the making.
If Kym’s discography is a collection of dreamscapes, the songs on Truest are lucid: No longer watching other characters brave her worlds, she waltzes through the house she’s spent years constructing. Like much of her earlier work, these songs come from a place of wistful longing; unlike anything she’s released before, they spotlight Kym’s singing voice, which claims a well-deserved spot in her woozy world. Album opener “Hesitations (Intro)” recalls dreamy R&B contemporaries like Liv.e and keiyaA, modulating and multiplying Kym’s murmurs to match the “faded,” “sedated” state she sketches out. Her chops—literally, chops—as a producer by now are familiar, but she foregrounds them in sinuous new shapes. “Test Your Patience” begins as a head-bopping saunter, until, within two minutes, Kym is gliding over a breakcore beat-switch, the way psychedelics might make you glide over grimy earth. “I’m convinced that this could be appealing,” she sings. She isn’t wrong.
Truest is the first Kym release to feature multiple producers besides herself, which makes for compelling, if peculiar, extensions of her palette. The 454-produced “Pool of Life” is fast and futurist, a groove-heavy Goldilocks zone between FAST TRAX 3 and The Velvet Rope—picture Janet Jackson in the studio with Nintendo devs. Skater-slash-rapper Na-Kel Smith has long favored pitched-up vocals and brash bass; over his frenetic beat for “Owed2Me,” Kym’s voice is in tinnitus territory, not controlling chaos so much as contributing to it. But as tripped-out as it is, and disarming as it may be for longtime listeners, it’s promising to see her take new risks, exploring others’ creative worlds instead of shrinking back into her own. Between Blair and now, she’s lived a few different artistic lives: punk-adjacent drummer, prolific hip-hop producer, soulful R&B singer. Seeing her surprise isn’t necessarily surprising.
The only featured artist on Truest is MIKE, godfather of the Brooklyn DIY enclave Kym spent the past several years studying, then sprouting from. Two years ago, on her debut solo tape, she enlisted him for a brief track called “Real Love”—less a full-fledged collaboration than a temp check, with MIKE rapping for a minute or so, as if feeling out her approach, then letting the beat ride out. There’s a full-circle moment here as both artists—and, now, both vocalists—immerse themselves on “In Doubt.” Kym’s production is far heavier than it was then; while the bassline swoops beneath her, she’s way up high, serenading a lover who no longer has to peer behind a drum kit, or sleuth out track credits, to see her. When the beat switches and MIKE comes in, it’s revelatory: the protégé playing host to the mentor.
