Here’s something nobody likes to hear: Hard work can only take you so far. That’s especially true in music and triply true in hip-hop, where indelible qualities like presence and personality tend to matter as much, if not more, than sheer skill. You can write the greatest rhymes the world’s ever heard, but if you can’t sell them it won’t buy you much.
Presence has never been a problem for Lorde Fredd33, who over the last couple of years has proved himself perhaps the most dynamic vocalist in Milwaukee hip-hop. He raps in at least a dozen distinct voices, and on his long-awaited full-length NORF: The Legend of HBR, he seems to discover new ones by the minute. On any given track he may sound like an impassioned blues singer, a hulking super villain, an irascible cartoon mascot, a plucky video game character or a churlish stand-up comic; if rap doesn’t work out for him, he could seriously consider voiceover work. He's one of those guys who could probably spend a track reading the back of a cereal box and make it sound thrilling.
NORF's great trick is pairing Fredd33 with music that’s every bit as creative and restless as his delivery. The production draws finds a middle ground between the weirder corners of contemporary trap and the smoothed-out jazz of ’90s hip-hop, which is interesting in and of itself, but often the beats are just a spring board for all the trappings and adornments. In spirit they’re a callback to hip-hop’s most ambitious, busiest golden-age masterpieces, albums like Tougher Than Leather, De La Soul is Dead, Paul’s Boutique and Don’t Sweat the Technique, ceaseless, kinetic records that never stopped moving, reaching and striving. Fredd33 periodically makes explicit nods to that window of the late-’80s and early ’90s—there’s his Leaders of the New School flow on “Possum Play” or his New Jack worship on “Bel Biv Devotion”—but mostly it manifests in his relentless experimentation and his insatiable hunger for surprise. This is one of the most inventive rap records you'll hear this year.
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The record is out today on most streaming services. You can stream it below via Bandcamp.
