Like Carti’s marble-mouthed verse on UTOPIA standout “FEIN,” Ken opts for a radically blunt approach, both in the delivery and the vocals-up-front mix. He sounds totally fried in the best way over Clif Shayne and Lucian’s rolling beat for “Pots” (imagine a swarm of those robot spiders from Spy Kids 2). On “Succubus,” which cranks up its heaviest bass frequencies into a blinding fog, he numbly croaks and croons through a bender while obsessing about an ex. He still sometimes reverts to uninspired clunkers and basic, Opium-core angst. (How many times do we need to hear about an “emo bitch” who “slit her wrists”?) And don’t get me started on this unforgivable get it? moment in “Vampire Hour”: “Everywhere I go, I keep a letter after J/Don’t let that shit go over your head, I keep a K.”
But cloaked in this album’s alluring packaging, a lot more of this strange, “bad” writing works because of how amped up everything is. Sometimes, he’ll do Wayne-like free association to land on future fan art: On the squelching “Nightcore 2,” he says he’s fly, then asks you to look up in the sky: “It’s not a plane, it’s not a bird/It’s X-Man, bitch, fuck what you heard!” It’s so dumb that you can’t help but crack a smile.
At a Brooklyn listening party for A Great Chaos last week, Ken moped around stage, lost in his own music, while a crowd of mostly high schoolers thrashed around and belted songs that had already leaked. At one point, he brought out Destroy Lonely; at another, his boss Playboi Carti, white diamonds embedded in his face like a Hindu god. Phones were whipped out, but Carti didn’t say a word, quickly retreating stage left to his posse and ceding attention back to Ken. It was no “Dre passing the torch to Kendrick” moment—they’re too cool for that—but the exhilarating music, experienced in unison by the Opium crew, indicated this was a coronation.
Rap since Whole Lotta Red, and since Yeat’s breakthrough records, has gotten brasher, bolder, more fiery. But Ken’s sound is now its own branch from that tree. The buzzing rapper OsamaSon, for example, seems to take influence from Ken’s sweltering production, meted-out flows, and flattened cadence. If Red is the Rosetta Stone for Rage 1.0, vast and colorful and dynamic, then A Great Chaos may well be the next crucial LP in this wave, capturing its own mind-numbing senselessness. It argues that maybe the doubters were just listening to Ken the wrong way. As for his longtime fans: This is the future those Rick-obsessed Opium disciples deserve: Something genuinely cool, risky, and relentless.
