Song You Need: ICYTWAT’s chilling “Give Her Soul”

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

ICYTWAT’s music feels like it’s gone through several different life cycles. While his essential remixes and production from the mid-2010s live on, the Chicago producer has gone on to evolve linearly—the hazy, nostalgic sounds he came up on have grown into tremorous and sludgy transmissions from outer space. And as a rapper, ICYTWAT’s goal is to encode messages in those transmissions that are meant to play in your head like on last year’s “Off Tha Leash!,” where his hypnotic chant raps swirl around like thunder clouds.

“Give Her Soul,” a chilling cut from his new EP Siddhi World, is in constant motion. Every few measures, the beat takes a sharp left turn that you can never fully prepare for. It sounds like speeding through a city’s streets late at night. His bouncy, breathless cadences and creeping flow make his verses coil up on themselves like rattlesnakes. “Stop tryna gas them niggas up, you know they tank empty / You might just level up if you just play yo role different nigga,” he raps. When he takes a breather for the hook, it feels like you just got done watching a marathon. Rap rarely sounds this stressful.