“Beep Beep” Is The Year’s Strangest Earworm

Get ready for another hard-to-shake tune from the strange universe of Dark World.

Gods Wisdom, a rapping songwriter from Massachusetts, has one of the oddest natural deliveries I've heard maybe ever. He made a new collaborative EP called On Thin Ice with Cooper Handy, a college cafeteria worker who records surreal pop songs as Lucy. The pair have described the joint project's aesthetic, which was fine-tuned using GarageBand, as "Elliott Smith meets dub."

Despite being so sparse that it's barely there at all, lead single "Beep Beep" is a jam. The way Gods Wisdom exhales the title phrase is magic — more like a guttural string of syllables than actual human words. The fluttering saxophone loop, which sounds like a melodic car horn, is played by Chicago-based Dark World co-founder Sen Morimoto, and the video's got cameos from crew members Reed and Purp. The mostly black-and-white clip was directed by Nick Briggs, who chose the congested streets of Manhattan over Dark World's usual small-town scenery.

The On Thin Ice EP is due in late October. Before that, on Friday, September 30, Gods Widsom is dropping a solo album called Self Restraint that features Mal Devisa, DJ Lucas, Morimoto, and more. Keep an eye out for both.