As counterintuitive as it feels to say about a guy who coats his vocals in a slurry of Auto-Tune, Rylo Rodriguez is a traditionalist at heart. That’s not to say he harkens back to a mythical era when Outkast, UGK, and 8Ball & MJG ruled the land; instead, his reference points assert that we need to update our conception of what a throwback is these days. On the 32-year-old Alabama rapper’s third album, S.K.A.T.E., he rides lush instrumentals in his half-rapping, half-singing style with vocals processed nearly to the point of unintelligibility—a gesture which, in the age of rappers who draw credible accusations of AI-ifying their vocals, scans as a human touch—yet his clever pen and eye for detail shine through.
As a rapper, Rodriguez—real name Ryan Adams, which, dear God—wears his influences on his sleeve. There’s the soulful singing-ass-rapping of Atlanta’s YFN Lucci, the gurgly impulsions to turn the fuck up so expertly offered by Future, and the oversharing introspection of Kevin Gates. He’s versatile enough that he can afford to react to a beat rather than imposing his will upon it, remaining casual about his technical ability even as he ensconces himself in the pocket.
Of those three (all still very active) touchstones, Gates actually shows up, his presence looming large on “Neighborhood Starz.” Rodriguez and Lil Baby, to whose imprint Glass Window he is signed, cede nearly half the song to Gates, and the 40-year-old rapper proceeds to deliver an unfathomably complex and melodic verse full of abjection and desperation, two-bar short stories (“I just told Duke Dennis, ‘Wish I was attending college’/Taught up in the trenches, dealin’ with narcotics”) and brand new tongue-twisters (“Pull up and prick they pimples”). As absurd and occasionally problematic a public figure as Gates may be, his performance is a potent reminder of why his cult is substantial enough to afford him a platform to say crazy shit on Club Shay Shay.
Rylo’s no slouch on the mic, either. Lurking just beneath the Auto-Tune is a lyricist par excellence who’s tremendously skilled at creating character studies in miniature. His songs are populated by blue-collar trappers who have to gas up their cars in enemy territory, travel on the Megabus, and create makeshift masks by tying T-shirts around their faces. On album opener “Stir,” he talks about an incarcerated friend who “said his wife sent him a letter and sprayed perfume on it, gotta hang a bedspread on the wall when you gotta take a shit.” He’s not even trying to rhyme the lines, and instead lets their clunkiness hang in the air as he leans into the isolation, discomfort, and dehumanization inherent to the prison-industrial complex.
Another thing Rylo’s got going for him is his penchant for being laugh-out-loud funny. One moment on album closer “Exposed,” he’s recreating the Annie Hall cocaine gag on wax; the next, he’s talking about being rage-baited for some reason. On “Sure G6,” he teases the classic Kanye couplet about Michael Jackson only to pump-fake and reference Skai Jackson in the second line. He flexes how fluidly he moves between the streets and the charts by rapping, “I got a whole lot of fugitives inside a room/I got 13 white people on a Zoom,” and then pauses to let a piano twinkle before a triumphant gospel sample swells. When Detroit’s Veeze, a semi-regular collaborator and another of the funniest rappers working today, pops up on “Kount Ya Hat,” it’s a meeting of the minds. Rylo’s jokes are at times mean-spirited and frequently offensive, but hey, nobody ever gave Don Rickles shit for mining similar veins for his material.
And oh my God, the beats! S.K.A.T.E.’s sonic foundation is laid largely by producers he’s worked with before, such as his fellow Alabamans Al Geno, Chi Chi, and JayRich; hungry up-and-comers like Desmos and Dee B; and a handful of folks, like WNS Beats and Luto Beats, whom Rylo and his team have seemingly rescued from salt mines of online beat marketplaces. It’s from this final group that he sources Luto Beats’ instrumental for “God 2 U (Selfish Ways),” which, barring some truly mind-blowing shit dropping soon, is firmly in the running for beat of the year. It’s a demented, minimalist take on The-Dream and Tricky Stewart’s most psychedelic productions, with damn near every sound reversed save for Rodriguez’s vocals, giving the effect of a not-unpleasant trip into a k-hole.
Other standouts include Chi Chi and Tye Beats’ stuttering gospel sample on “Low Top Vanz,” how “Exposed” has the smoothest sax and most panoramic piano this side of Bruce Hornsby, and Al’Geno’s flip of a random acoustic Maxwell cover that scaffolds “Art.” The only true household name behind the boards here is Zaytoven, who gives Rylo what essentially sounds like a leftover from Beast Mode on “AP Skelly,” though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Given the voluminous credits, the record is a marvel of curation and sequencing—all the more astonishing when you consider that Rodriguez arranged the tracks so that the first letter of each spells out the egregiously unnecessary backronym “Silence Keeps All Targets Exposed.” (This in itself is a very “classic hip-hop”-style move.)
At its best moments, S.K.A.T.E. can feel out of time, as warm as vintage Goodie Mob, but with lyrics about Elon Musk’s Twitter and Terry Rozier’s gambling arrest. It’s not that they don’t make ’em like this anymore—they do—it’s just that Rodriguez has taken pains to craft a true album, free from label meddling or single-chasing. It’s a confident statement of intent, one that cements Rylo Rodriguez as one of the keepers of the Southern rap flame.
