Weekly Fresh : CULTURE

You can draw a line from Pi’erre Bourne’s spacey, pixelated beats on Playboi Carti’s self-titled mixtape to countless production choices of the last half-decade. To name two: flansie and Skimayne’s synth storm on Yeat’s “Gët Busy” and OK’s bruising bassline on OsamaSon’s “Fool.” For a couple years in the late 2010s, Pi’erre was one of the most innovative producers in hip-hop, concocting pure ear candy by layering sugary electronic melodies and silly soundbites over locomotive 808s. You can hear plenty of Atlanta in his beats, but albums like The Life of Pi’erre 4 sound more like he’s hotboxing a spaceship in the vein of Wiz Khalifa, Sledgren, and Cardo Got Wings.

The next star in the lineage of futuristic chill might be Minneapolis producer tdf. A fixture of 2020s blown-out underground rap, he’s surely studied Pi’erre’s music like a sacred text. His great new album, CULTURE, is full of similarly dramatic transitions, collagist sound design and hypnotic melodies that seem suspended in time. But tdf transcends Pi’erre’s sound by leaning into the swampiness, cranking up the low end, and scuffing up the mixes a bit more. He also leans harder into the ethos of a mixtape, playing conductor to a chorus of underground rappers. These songs were likely stitched together over email or Discord and assembled piecemeal, but they have the lived-in feel of a stoned hangout in the basement.

Even with all the vocalists in the mix, the star of the show here is tdf, who fits together drums, melodies and samples into chugging, noisy dreamscapes. A flip of a Frank Ocean Tumblr classic becomes the gleefully twitchy “Numb” with jssr. On the next song, “Stamped,” tdf cuts up on a keyboard as 1oneam deadpans sweet nothings. Like the artists he’s influenced by, it’s hard not to mention “vibes” when talking about this music—zone out and let this tape’s hazy synth clouds wash over you. Key to his beat construction are bits of found sound, which are sometimes so sticky and surprising they’re like mini hooks. Like Pi’erre Bourne, he loves animal sounds, lion roars especially, but he can get even weirder; on “Still My Patna” with ATL Smook, he punctuates bars with a sample of Dragonball Z character Goku screaming.

CULTURE could use even more of this cheekiness. I miss the irreverence of his 2023 album BLUEPRINT, where he spams actual audio snippets of salty haters saying things like, “N***a put somebody named Spoof on his tape; that is the craziest shit I ever seen, bro.” (Justice for Spoof; he slid on “Bands Gone!”) CULTURE has narration, too, but this time it’s from an aggravating uncle who sounds like he was given zero guidance on what to talk about.

Speaking of Spoof: The rappers on this tape range from mythic pulls from tdf’s inner sanctum (omgkeon, NYM Riz) to Hyperpop Daily has-beens (Dom Corleo) to artists who might blow up (1oneam and the actual white rapper of the moment, Okaymar). That parity is refreshing, it reminds me of an old DJ Clue mixtape that might’ve put you on to someone cool. They largely coast on the same handful of melodic flows, shrugged-off flexes, and vocal textures, all loosely stemming from the styles of Duwap Kaine and Izaya Tiji. Some of them have their moments—Okaymar skates all across “Face Card,” BenjiCold sounds delirious on “Rave”—but CULTURE is not a talent show. They seem aligned on curating a specific vibe here, one that’s communal, bantering, and relaxed like a group chat. Like a DJ mix, the edges of songs melt together via pristine pitch-shifting and beat-matching. It’s rare to come across a producer-led compilation tape that has such a focused collective vision.

There is one stretch, about halfway through CULTURE, that will break most brains on impact: the suite of skull-crushing, no-Auto-Tune tracks helmed by wildkarduno, Smokingskul and thr33, whose raucous chemistry brings to mind an image of Ed, Edd n Eddy. It’s all gnarly, chattering 808s and scalding, sermon-esque raps that might grate on your ears but also would’ve made DMX proud. Zoomer genre taxonomists often call it “dark plugg,” although in a Fader interview, tdf dismissed that name for it entirely. However you categorize it, his work on these five beats is wonderfully disgusting, particularly “Cassava Leaf,” which sounds like entering the eye of a malware storm. Just when you thought tdf’s bag was pillowy, post-Pi’erre bliss, he inspires thr33 to release his inhibitions and full-on black out: “tdf beat, you know I’m finna preach.” Even though CULTURE is all about setting a mood, it also showcases the rising producer’s tantalizing range.