OzzeyDoesIt’s new single “For the City”

Firm but flexible enough to avoid the sonic blows coming down before it around every turn in the track, OzzeyDoesIt’s rapping in the new single “For the City” is lean and mean to say the least. Utilizing an organic flow instead of the heavily augmented nonsense a lot of his peers in and out of the American underground have been reliant on when making new music, OzzeyDoesIt delivers a synthetic-free slab of hip-hop carnage in this latest release, which I would go ahead and qualify as being one of his more well-rounded compositions to see widespread release in the last year. Debuting in 2019 with an LP titled The Exposition, this is one rapper who seems intent on finding a meteoric rise to fame – even if it means getting a little experimental in the studio.

The instrumentation here gets particularly assaultive in the chorus, pushing home the narrative with a heady wallop of melodic presence that would typically be too much for a conventional vocalist to contend with. Through both a steady-handed command over the background levels and an unforced moxie that comes with every word he raps to us, OzzeyDoesIt never sounds shaken by the ambitiousness of the beats in “For the City;” on the contrary, his swagger is off the charts, arguably because of the pressurized environment in which we find him in. There’s a lot of emphasis on the hook, but not as much as one might anticipate out of an American hip-hop cut in 2020.

I really like the juxtaposition of the bass and the vocal, especially as we near the conclusion of this single. In capitalizing off of the natural tension that exists in this backdrop, not only is OzzeyDoesIt able to make the substance of his lyrics feel all the more cutting, but he’s actually able to make the rhythm of the beat sound a heck of a lot more larger than life than it really is. While he isn’t depending on a lot of frills behind the board to create the allusion of an intense groove bearing down on us, he’s definitely manipulating the raw materials set before us in this master mix, which essentially puts his style of arranging on par with those who pioneered funk some half-century ago.

There have been quite a few interesting tracks coming out of the rap underground this season, but if you’re looking for something a little more on the alternative side, I would recommend checking out what OzzeyDoesIt has to say in the new single “For the City.” “For the City” doesn’t change the artistic parameters of hip-hop for the better or worse; it instead presents us with some unique twists to a familiar stylization that could potentially lead to a groundbreaking effort from this artist in the future. OzzeyDoesIt lays out a fantastic blueprint worth following-up with in this most recent release, and provided he keeps this caliber of content as his standard, I doubt this will be the lone headline-making single bearing his name in the credits.

Nicole Killian