When talking about the “trap revival” movement of the last four years, Russell White’s name is hardly ever mentioned. Most people recognize Mad Decent labelmates Diplo and Flosstradamus as the genre’s leading artists, but Rustie’s 2011 debut, Glass Swords, offered a much more complex vision for the future of trap mixing. White has since probed further into the denser soundscapes that trap can provide, as evidenced by his latest singles and recent shift into hip-hop production. Thus, it only makes sense that he would enlist the most ill-mannered MC and product of the Detroit trap houses, Danny Brown.
He has already proven his flow can match a wide pallet of textures (see Purity Ring’s produced “25 Bucks” from his latest LP, Old) but alongside Rustie’s seizure-inducing bass cannon blasts, Brown takes on a new form. His raspy barks of lines like “You ain’t fuckin’ with me, might as well OD” align perfectly with White’s MDMA-fueled banger, and you begin to wonder: “Why hasn’t this happened sooner?”