Crazy to think of a time when I'd rather hear anyone but Bladee on a track. The Swede’s quaint, throaty delivery made so much of his earlier, unpolished work feel draped in irony, as though anybody bumping his music was part of some inside joke. But because of his malleability and knack for uncanny melody, I grew to love the same qualities I used to reject. He never needed to explain himself. Bladee’s sometimes-playful, always-nihilistic autofiction has made his presence a guiding light, one that’s changed hues and cast new shadows over time. The anecdotes he’s penned–on ego death, on shopping sprees, on the act of sharing scars–have consistently felt as natural and spontaneous as they do perceptive.
On Sulfur Surfer, the latest addition to Bladee’s sizable catalog, there’s this almost caricature-like approach to the way he tries to solidify himself as the imposing avant-gardist he already is. “I am the only one that has anything interesting to say these days,” he spits on “Blondie.” “You all fucking disgust me.” The sentiment feels strangely heavy-handed, conveyed through priestly monologues, Biblical parallels, and goblin-like snarls that pop up across the board. He can still tap into the ethereal plane, but the weightlessness that’s made him so cool appears sporadically.
The more that Bladee leans further into mysticism and allegory, the more he treats it as a substitute for flex rap. “I hereby declare war on the evil star, I demand its defeat/Desecrate its police,” Bladee intones repeatedly on the “Sulfur Surfer.” “I am the upholder of divine law.” It sets the tone for mouthfuls of absurdist, fantastical imagery that practically pour out of him: black dragons, magic vikings, kings of castles. Over the martial drums of “Dolor,” where he asserts his desire to “hurt and wound and scar,” his medieval embrace sounds hammy in the way that a Shrek villain would. Oftentimes, flashes of imagery are flimsily thrown out at random. “Casting runes with the axe, sing in tune with the trash,” he growls on “Killswitch,” a line sandwiched between other non-sequiturs about graveyards and nightmares and treasure maps that wither away before they land. Sulfur Surfer is as open an embrace with fantasy as nearly anything Bladee’s put out up to now, but it can feel way more overwrought and cheesy than it does compelling.
More interesting is how the atmosphere of this record fits into the canon of his past work. Sulfur Surfer feels like a reprise of the boyish croons of Crest, the crunchy textures of Cold Visions, and the elysian ambiance that made 333 so special. With “Under my Umbrella,” he finds balance between all three: the angelic harmonies and pulsating tones, the jagged bassline scratching the floor, the mutated, childlike vocals on the hook. If one thing’s for certain, it’s that Whitearmor, Bladee’s lead (and in this case, sole) producer, hasn’t lost a step. His way of spelling impending doom through his digital mosaics is always marked by beauty and grace; the feeling is never too anxious to keep you from taking stock of what’s around you.
Vocally, Sulfur Surfer depicts Bladee at his most inconsistent: he lulls himself to sleep on “Fox & Birch” and screeches like Gollum on “Highland Tyrant,” but he whispers like his coolest, most casual self on “Durins Bane.” His performances feel drab and uninspired at their worst, but he’s always capable of something hard or spontaneously gorgeous. The roughneck posturing would make at least a little more sense over a Cold Visions reprise like “Durins Bane,” but the fact that he uses that beat to rap about being a chill guy instead is kinda funny. “The Dark Mirror,” full of Whitearmor’s glossy arpeggios and galactic embellishments, platforms a beautiful, breathless hook that does way more to prove Bladee’s worth than the villainous self-seriousness that crops up elsewhere. He sounds blissfully exasperated, like a mountain climber so grateful to reach the summit that they have nothing left to do but exclaim. In turn, it makes me feel the same way, like when his music really clicked for the first time.
