Dealers of God are the kind of act that you immediately send to someone you trust, not necessarily because you think they need to hear it, but because you want to make sure that your brain isn’t tricking you. The Australian collective seem transported from a half-remembered dream after a night spent clicking between hundreds of browser tabs — click, there’s an obscure cloud rap song on Youtube with 14 views. Click, there’s the most beautiful painting you’ve ever seen and will forget about in two seconds. Click, there’s a meme you don’t fully understand but laugh at anyway. This ceaseless serotonin binge is rendered cosmic on Dealer’s Choice, the sophomore project from Dealers of God. Originally released on January 1, 2023, it returns in 2024 with a newly remastered and extended edition courtesy of the underground label Dismiss Yourself featuring remixes from DJ Rozwell, Moa, and more.
For most listeners, though, this will be their first experience of the album. And at its best, the music is genuinely revelatory. The production contains some of the most intricately composed plunderphonics I’ve heard in years — on display is a Dust Brothers-level keenness for taking clashing sounds from across music and forming new colors. Nothing feels off limits: new age samples and trip-hop-inspired breaks rub up against excerpts from viral newscasts. Matrix soundtrack rave, Mazzy Star excerpts, and haunting solo piano dirges link up. The boundlessness never loses the quality of a pure celebration of music’s malleability.
Unfortunately, distracting from the majesty of the music are the vocalists, who have a comparably diminished sense of adventure. For the most part, they entirely rap and sing about selling and consuming drugs with an irony that can at times seem like disdain for the hip-hop they’re channeling. A shame, because the experience of listening to the album front-to-back leaves you pondering the threads of a spectral narrative whose potential isn’t fully realized. Still, there’s enough true beauty here to make Dealer’s Choice reverberate in your brain for longer than most material from your average internet binge. — Jordan Darville