Top$ide and Shaudy Kash have fostered the type of chemistry that you usually only see between detective pairings on Law & Order (à la Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis), where the beats of their relationship have played out on loop without a hitch. You’re able to set your watch to the way the Detroit pairing’s rhythms interact. The Monroe, La.-raised Top$ide sets the mood with morose, chilling funk beats—often representing a zig to the city’s pounding club production—letting Kash saunter under the radar with his conversational register and rambling rants. By the arrival of the fourth and latest installment of their On the Yeah Side series, the “feeling out” portion of Top$ide and Shaudy Kash’s partnership is decidedly in the rearview mirror.
Throughout On the Yeah Side Deluxe (the follow-up to 2024’s Vol. 3), the two artists focus on refining the formula they’ve cemented over the past three years. Where previous iterations felt largely insular, here, Top$ide and Shaudy Kash are set on inviting more and more Detroit voices into the fold with a slew of remixes. Some of the guests’ energies are misaligned with On the Yeah Side Deluxe’s tenor, but the pairing’s synergy remains undeniable, sometimes making you wonder why they ever stray away from each other.
Top$ide’s serene, gloomy production almost doubles as a soothing paint-by-numbers exercise for Shaudy Kash. These beats often feel like the soundtrack to a crime movie montage, backing the moment that someone admits to doing dirt of the highest degree: take “Logic > emotions,” where Shaudy Kash muses about shooting someone because they insulted his marksmanship as a muted, groovy bassline churns in the background. In another life, “Forreal (Top$ide Mix)” would stand out in the back end of a late ’90s No Limit tape, played exclusively in seedy basements and cellars clouded with cigar smoke. Here, it allows Shaudy Kash to get wistful about stealing your girl without breaking a sweat in a comfortable environment, where you can almost see him shrugging as he admits it. But the similarities between the softer beats cause some moments to run together and fall short, especially if Shaudy Kash and others aren’t on their game. Shaudy Kash lacks some of the sharpness of his other performances on “Chameleon,” where his bars get bogged down and the lines bleed together. It feels like YBN LIL BRO spends most of his cameo on “Stuck In My Ways” doing a balancing act, trying to find the right pocket while toeing the line between tough and sensitive.
The tweaks to the blueprint register as vestigial but overall welcome—Baby Money’s blistering showing on “Still on the Yeah Side” is a welcome foil to Shaudy’s cool delivery, and Milwaukee rapper Chicken P’s staccato, intrusive thought raps on “Life of a CBFDUBBER (Remix)” imbue the track with a satisfying energy. But the real spirit of the On the Yeah Side Deluxe rests in the way that Shaudy Kash contorts his bars to mesh with Top$ide’s instrumentals, sneaking in rousing wordplay and devious toxicity under the cover of a low-effort delivery. On “New York Freestyle (On the Radar),” he raps, “Defensive coordinator how I send a blitz for him,” before using macaroni shells as a way to brag about defeating his opps and his sexual exploits in consecutive breaths. Even as the entropy increases on the psychedelic-leaning “Wassup” and bouncy, low-rider inspired “Dearly Beloved,” Shaudy’s understated, West Coast-esque swagger doesn’t feel out of place, using a stream-of-consciousness flow to remain in lockstep with the peaks and valleys of Top$ide’s inclinations. But it’s the skit at the center of On the Yeah Side Deluxe that contains the album’s most resounding moment: a poem to Shaudy’s standing as the smoothest rapper in the game that heaps praise upon the rapper, read by YouTuber EricTheYoungGawd. It feels like an uproarious wedding toast from a best man, the kind that results from a working relationship that brings out the duo’s best—as if raising each others’ potential was their true purpose all along.
