Cadence Weapon - ROLLERCOASTER (2024) [Hi-Res]

The way that social media's thirst for conflict can be detrimental to artistic expression has been such an intensely examined subject that an entire hip-hop concept record about it seems like a gimme. But it's a subject worth trusting Rollie Pemberton to get to the core of. ROLLERCOASTER is Cadence Weapon's followup to 2021's Parallel World, his Polaris Music Prize-winning examination of social justice through a Black Canadian perspective, and it's like zooming in from that record's wide-scope interrogations of his dystopian alienation into a specific portion of the digital world that amplifies its stress effects.

This is a subject that has the potential to be bluntly trenchant, even kind of obvious, at least in the midst of a discourse saturated with tech-skeptical unease. But sometimes the obvious statements are what you need to hear the most: that an utter dependence on tech has blurred our ability to differentiate between its benefits and its detriments ("My Computer"), that the pressure to live up to the mercurial expectations of a parasocial audience can be paralyzing ("Press Eject"), that it's created a mutated type of media which also doubles as a dysfunctional mode of human coexistence you can't just touch grass to escape ("Blue Screen"). It's not all condemnation, at least; "Exceptional" and "Lexicon" capture the vanishing but still-achievable thrill of taking advantage of the internet's open-ended resources to define yourself on your own terms, even if some of those terms come from other people's precedents.

ROLLERCOASTER also comes across a bit more like a nuanced examination than a smash-your-phone gripe session in part because while the beats maintain a consistently pulse-manipulating sense of futurist hip-hop/dance fusion, they also sprawl everywhere: Machinedrum's serrated electro adding a nervous twitch to "My Computer"; Bartees Strange's transhumanist voice and nervous-rattle ambient-soul rhythms haunting "You Are Special To Me"; Jacques Greene's frenetic, glitchy IDMR&B embodying both the anxiety and the defiance driving "Exceptional" and "Sting"; Harrison's reflective, melancholy jazz keys underpinning the exasperated disillusionment of closer "tl:dr." And as straightforward and familiar as his lyrical sentiments are, it's the urgency and the distortion and the underlying tension in Cadence Weapon's delivery that makes it easy to feel their weight, until it almost seems like he's replicating the queasy, nervous itch in the brain that comes with an endless stream of ambient doomscrolling negativity. © Nate Patrin

Tracklist:
1.01 - Cadence Weapon - Cadence £∞™.mp3 (1:18)
1.02 - Cadence Weapon, Grandtheft - Press Eject (2:49)
1.03 - Cadence Weapon, Jacques Greene - Exceptional (2:12)
1.04 - Cadence Weapon - My Computer (2:57)
1.05 - Cadence Weapon - Blue Screen (2:27)
1.06 - Cadence Weapon - Lexicon (2:13)
1.07 - Cadence Weapon - YASTM.m4a (1:09)
1.08 - Cadence Weapon - EFT (3:22)
1.09 - Cadence Weapon - Bots (3:04)
1.10 - Cadence Weapon, Jacques Greene - Sting (2:03)
1.11 - Cadence Weapon, myst milano - Shadowbanned (2:44)
1.12 - Cadence Weapon, Bartees Strange - You Are Special To Me (1:53)
1.13 - Cadence Weapon, Austra - Alarms (2:45)
1.14 - Cadence Weapon, HARRISON - tl;dr (3:27)