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.
It is one of the great losses of the mixtape era that there are now fewer full-length rap — and in the case of Anysia Kym and Jadasea‘s Pressure Sensitive, rap-adjacent — albums that capture the feeling of peeking into somebody’s studio and witnessing creative sparring in real-time. Pressure Sensitive brings the sensation back, while darting between hip-hop, rave, and jagged sound design, with “Stain” standing as a clear example of its success.
From the song’s opening seconds of foggy synths, muttered raps, and blown-out drums, “Stain” immediately recalls Dean Blunt, both as a solo artist and as a member of Babyfather (a press release for Pressure Sensitive describes the influence of London, Franco Rosso’s Babylon, and R&B music, all of which likely went into Babyfather’s 2016 project BBF). About midway through, the song switches from “flexing near the biggest speakers in heaven’s hottest club” to barely decipherable bars over melodies that sound like they’re being unspooled by a broken cassette player in real-time. Like any good pirate radio station, the raw creative material, still coated in dust and grime, is what’s so appealing.
