The overstimulated, lightning-fast raps of Phiik and Lungs seem powered by sheer force of will. Since 2020’s Another Planet, the Long Island artists have been sprinting to their own internal metronome, rhyming over gritty, drumless loops that sound like they were unearthed from a dusty documentary about Guliani-era New York. On “Captain Picard,” from their recently released album Another Planet 4, they cram in as many syllables and anecdotes as possible over somber horns and clatter that sounds like rain hitting a tin roof. (It was produced, like everything else in the series, by Lungs under the name LoneSword.) Phiik calls out a “45-year-old off-duty cop” in Nike Dunks for looking “like a bozo who bruise easy” while Lungs admits to shedding tears over the death of zoological icon Steve Irwin and mentions a plug who shares the same French-Canadian passport as Star Trek’s Captain Picard. A lot of rappers can’t fit this much personality and detail into a whole album, let alone one song, but Phiik and Lungs go at it with superhuman endurance.
