Listening to LAZER DIM 700 in album format feels a bit like stopping a comedian during his set and asking him to explain why his jokes are funny. Since the 23-year-old Atlanta rapper fine-tuned his Roadrunner-on-lean style about a year and a half ago, his work has come out in a constant stream of abbreviated songs, which are buoyed in the algorithm by his outlandish comic persona and constant online presence. To break this output into discrete units seems at best beside the point and at worst antithetical to the larger, brain-scrambling project.
When listening to Lazer, I often think of his claim that when he started rapping, he would do so while holding a cell phone in each hand: one to play the beat, the other to record that beat and his rapping. This evokes the DIY resourcefulness that has always been core to hip-hop, sure. But it’s also something more distinctly modern, and more than a little unsettling—the idea of the human as a conduit between different modems, his thoughts informed and metabolized by the internet in a perfect loop.
Sins Aloud, Lazer’s second album—though the distinction between it and the preceding mixtapes is, again, arbitrary—opens oddly for him, with prodbydrg’s velvet-soft “Feel Like 2016.” This is the kind of record that would be a welcome change of pace if you stumbled onto it after an hour of being bludgeoned by Lazer’s usual, white-hot fare. But its sequencing here reminded me of how, a decade ago, Young Thug opened Barter 6 with “Constantly Hating.” This was another ascendant, idiosyncratic Atlanta rapper who, in the normal rhythm of rap careers, was expected to make his Big Statement Album; in both cases, the star-in-waiting wrongfoots the listener, and in doing so exhibits control over the mood, the stakes, his career.
While Lazer has cultivated the air of an irreverent scamp who could care less about that sort of lineage, it’s instructive to remember that before the end of 2023, his music fit much more squarely into Atlanta traditions. As late as that year’s hot streak, his projects were essentially updates on Brick Squad tapes from the late 2000s and early 2010s. His vocals were already unmixed, evidently hasty BandLab recordings, but his delivery was slower and voice deeper, his taste in beats inflected with contemporary plugg but still defaulting to gothic, post-Lex Luger maximalism. That sensibility finds its way onto Sins Aloud: “Feel Like 2016” gives way to Smokkestaxkk and Simani’s “Sins,” where instrumentation that could have fit on one of those pre-prison Gucci mixtapes is undergirded by drum programming that could only come in the long, many-times-mutated wake of drill.
And so Sins Aloud is the best evidence yet of Lazer as a synthesizer: The beats for “Kill Switch” and “Wigary” could have been pulled off of Whole Lotta Red, “Opps N Kamole” off of a haunted GameBoy Color. “1 Line,” which was produced by a pair of kids from Ukraine, even channels cloud rap, the pillowy counterweight to Lex’s outrageous style during Lazer’s middle school days. It would be tempting (and flattering) to say that Lazer unifies all these sounds; really, his haphazard recordings give the impression of someone with excellent taste who has assembled an archive of others rappers’ beats from across two decades and taken his own Dedication-ish stab at making them his own. He can move freely between these musical modes because he seems to have internalized all their rhythms—and then decided that, when necessary, he’ll simply be impervious to them.
As with any emergent or resurrected style of rap that strays too far from conventional patterns over 4/4 beats, Lazer’s flows have been divisive. Of course, the freewheeling delirium is what makes his best tracks work. But there are times when his frequent punch-ins serve more to make the song feel ill-considered than to overwhelm the listener in a way that feels satisfying or intentional; his writing, though studded with outlandish boasts and clever juxtapositions, can fall into ruts where it becomes drab and indistinct, turning vocals that should be nimble and urgent into something heavy and immobile. This ends up sinking roughly the first third of Sins Aloud which, save for some electric passages on “Kill Switch,” does little to lodge itself in the memory. But by the time he lands on the halting, taunting cadence he uses for the chorus on “Washed Up Ahh Boy,” it’s clear that Lazer can only be ignored for so long: sooner or later, the 1s and 0s find a way.
