Discover Blogly is The FADER's curated roundup of our favorite new music discoveries.
Dean Blunt, Hackney Commercial Waste 22/23
Dean Blunt rarely gives interviews, doesn’t appear on any official social media channels, and frequently drops without warning. But his elusiveness has always gone beyond artifice and reflected his work’s foundational quality. Sometimes, it doesn’t hit till years later: BBF, Blunt’s 2016 experimental rap mixtape with his group Babyfather, felt like a lived-in-if-baffling tribute to the Black musical traditions of inner-city London; today, it stands out as a definitive document of the rising political consciousness in the Black Lives Matter era, painfully aware of its necessity while taking a wary view of culture’s place in the movement.
Today, Dean Blunt occupies a space somewhere between a high fashion streetwear company practicing artificial scarcity and a revered figure of the underground. New drops are detected by dedicated fans, who furiously pour over them, dutifully place them in the Dean pantheon, and then do the good work of spreading the gospel. So it was with Hackney Commercial Waste 22/23, a 70-track, two-and-a-half-hour-long collection uploaded to YouTube and WeTransfer a week ago (the links were soon removed, so your best bet for a download is now Reddit). As the massive length suggests, the songs are mostly sketches, showcasing Blunt’s keen talents as a producer and crafter of loops, whether they’re pulled from previously existing sources like film soundtracks or created in studio with a full band. There are relatively “complete” songs here too, like the sludgy dream-pop nightmare of “CRYBABY” and the Panda Bear collab “VIP Mix,” where Noah Lennox’s Brian Wilson-y vocals clash against Blunt’s, which sound recorded through the world’s most compressed onboard mic. More than other official Dean Blunt projects, this massive dump of unfinished work both undermines and boosts Blunt’s enigma, a fitting representation of how he always keeps one foot tantalizingly outside of his ether. — Jordan Darville