Earlier this week, three rappers at the top of the game right now, but in three different lanes – Skepta, Chip and Young Adz dropped a big shocker on anyone even remotely interested in rap.
Collab album, this Friday, single out Wednesday night.
What makes the collaboration, titled ‘Insomnia’ such a shocker is just that no one really asked for it, let alone expected a collaboration between these three. Skepta and Chip are two of North London’s finest, and a project between the two makes sense. In the same way, Chip and Adz are two of the top artists in the charts when it comes to melodies and autotune, so Chip jumping on a DBE project on an ‘Any Minute Now’ kind of vibe makes sense too.
All three are in interesting places in their careers now too. Skepta is fresh off a great album in Ignorance Is Bliss that dropped last summer. Young Adz dominated streaming services with LB last year, dropping three tapes – the first of which, Home Alone, made the blogs favourite albums of the year list’. And Chip hasn’t dropped in a while but his next release is heavily anticipated, as people notice that for someone over 10 years deep in rap, he seems to be getting better as a lyricist.
But when you put all three of these heavy hitters on one project, you have an interesting mix – three talented rappers, a wide range of musical talents, and most importantly, the pure curiosity factor to draw a hell of a lot of people in. The element of surprise is an advantage even in dropping music, apparently. Me personally, like a lot of fans of the artists individually, I just want to see what this tape is going to sound like.
Last night we got our first taste in Waze – and I wasn’t disappointed. As a fan of all three, I’m definitely more excited for the album coming tomorrow.
The beat was produced by one of my personal favourite producers out of the states, CardoGotWings, who laced them with a banger to say the least. It’s a trap beat, and something not too far form what you might hear on a DBE tape. It’s got a lot of energy, with some simple synth melodies and flutes backed by some hard hitting 808s. It’s a lot more hyped up than a lot of Cardo’s stuff, but it does the job and no one sounds out of place.
Young Adz takes the hook on the tune, doing his usual autotune wave and giving a catchy very trapper inspired chorus, and making the title reference to the Waze GPS app. His verse is short, leaving the lyrical work to Chip and Skepta.
Chip is definitely the highlight of the song – he comes in straight off the back of Adz’ verse, sounding ready to come for rappers’ necks. If you were wondering whether he was going to sing or rap on the song, he makes the answer easy for you. He glides effortlessly over the beat with a verse that’s longer than Adz and Skepta’s put together.
Skepta sounds just as comfy on the beat, talking about his success, drugs, and matching Adz’ trapper content with some cool punchlines like ‘I get a mop like a cleaner, I can get Koffee and Justin Bieber’.
If this is the best example of what the album is going to sound like, I’m not mad at it. It’s a banger that could get rinsed in clubs, cars and gyms alike.
But it definitely raises some more questions – is Skepta going to dabble in autotune? If Chip is going to rap like this all over the project, is Adz finally going to rap? what's this lb feature going to sound like?
All of that will be answered tomorrow, but till then you can watch the video for Waze above.
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