So Wavy Luciano, the latest mixtape by Bloody!, pushes hedonism to manic-depressive extremes. One moment, the New York City rapper sounds utterly unbothered, recalling stoned hookups and late-night cups of coffee over pillowy plugg beats; the next, he raps like he’s shaking you by the shoulders, so bored he’s beginning to panic. On “Need a Nerdy Bitch,” fantasizing about the bookish girl of his dreams sends Bloody! spiraling, stray bytes of cyborgian Auto-Tune flying off each bar like spittle as his rant grows more impassioned. “Man, I need me a quiet bitch,” he half-sings, half-pants to the tune of Jugg6k’s StoopidXool-esque synth pads, beginning to outpace the beat. “Man, I need some Xans. Man, I need a plan. Man, I need some love,” he continues, wrung out in the gears of a sinister desiring-machine. Though the phrase “I feel good” is something of a mantra throughout the tape, it’s repeated with a sense of superstitious habit. Bloody! knows pleasure is fleeting, and he’s hanging on for dear life.
Bloody! rose to underground prominence in the early 2020s as part of an emerging wave of jerk-rap revivalists like Xaviersobased, idkcap, and percosits, who experimented with snare-centric drum programming and lo-fi sound design. His 2022 SUPER JAIL!!! mixtape was one of the scene’s most ethereal releases. While his peers often opted to bury their voices beneath layers of pixelation, Bloody! favored clarity, fostering an unusually meditative energy despite his liberal use of distortion. As he and most of the nu-jerk originators have pursued other genres, Bloody!’s ambient approach to swag rap has remained constant. Citing artists like Chicago drill rapper Lil Jay, former Soulja Boy signee Agoff, and pre-mixtape Carti as influences, his recent work embraces the D.I.Y. aesthetic of the early 2010s online underground, particularly the raw, trebly interplay between low-bitrate instrumentals and deadpan vocals recorded straight to laptop via Snowball mic.
Bloody!’s affinity for early Soundcloud rap is especially evident on So Wavy Luciano. Plugg production is more influential than ever in the alt-rap ecosystem, but offshoots like pluggnb and dark plugg tend to abandon its breathable simplicity to craft intricate compositions. So Wavy Luciano is traditionalist by comparison. Aside from decorative bells and the occasional wriggling sine wave, its production de-emphasizes melody in favor of moody organ chords that sprawl out over several bars.
The spaciousness allows Bloody! to explore off-kilter pockets and deliveries with the curiosity of a jazz improviser. Midway through “You Know Its Luciano,” he jabs at the beat with slight variations of the song’s title, letting ripples of delay and heavy reverb emanate from his voice and intersect within the chord progression. It’s a welcome moment of tranquility carved out between verses about stick talk and pill-popping. On “I Feel Good,” Bloody! hops on an instrumental that sounds like a cutesy JRPG overworld theme, indexing his favorite things like he’s Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Using the list as a generative device allows him to again direct the listener’s attention to his cadence rather than lyricism. As the track continues for nearly four minutes, Bloody! gets increasingly lost in the reverie, howling and stretching out his syllables as he remarks that the weed he smokes “smells so goooooood.”
Eventually, though, cracks start to form in the dopaminergic feedback loop: “When I’m away from you, I don’t feel good,” he later admits, before numbing the pain with a Xanax. Even in his state of ecstasy, Bloody! reveals a paranoid self-awareness: a rough comedown looms in the shadows. For the moment, though, So Wavy Luciano is a pleasantly dreamy space to curl up inside. As droning keys echo into oblivion, spinning the album feels like getting so drowsy that each thought seems to trail off mid-sentence. With memory and reason beyond your grasp, there’s no place to occupy but the present, buoyed by a muffled 808 kick.
