Recently, in a video shot by FACT magazine, the Cantonese-rapping, UK enigma Triad God delivered an exclusive performance in the streets of London's Chinatown, drawling slowly and incomprehensibly (to us) over the din of city life. At the end of the video, in a segment marked "Freestyle," he switches to English, but starts rapping the words to AZN Pride's pridefully self-stereotyping, hip-hop cult classic "Got Rice Bitch?", which combines references to rice and chopsticks with declarations like, "wassup we the shit and we kill ya'll fools." The video confirmed that Triad God, né Vinh Ngan, is indeed a real person, but it made us even more confused as to what the project, a collaboration with London producer Palmistry, is really all about. "I Never Told You," a mid-tempo jam from his reissued NXB mixtape, out today on Hippos In Tanks, sees Ngan dishing out basic, vocoded variations on the sentence "I never told you, I want to hold you" over some trancey piano chords. We get what is ostensibly a softer side of the hard-living, Chinatown casino dweller, while Tobias Lee's remix, included with the track, gives it a cerebral, ambient twist.
Stream: Triad God, "I Never Told You"