(L) Evilgiane. Photo by Francisco Russo (R) Slimesito. Photo via management.
Discover Blogly is The FADER’s curated roundup of our favorite new music discoveries.
Halfway through EVILSLIME, Slimesito takes a breather in the middle of the breakneck “MAKE IT HOME.” He’s been rapping for about 50 seconds straight at this point, heaping long-O end rhymes atop each other. “I been had motion, that shit for sho / I’m smokin on zam I can’t do no lows;” “I’m toting new Glocks and they different tones / they biting my drip you know I’m having clones / I’m scamming this money like this shit a loan;” etcetera. In that brief pause, a wispy synth courtesy of Evilgiane and Whitearmor wobbles vividly as Sito dives into his second verse. It feels like a beam of moonlight breaking through dark clouds.
When Slimesito and I spoke back in February, the Atlanta rapper told me that Evilgiane ranks among the few producers he lets pick beats for him, citing the Surf Gang cofounder’s strong vision as a producer. “He pushed me to be more experimental, more creative... I call him Evil Genius.” That’s no small praise coming from Slimesito, whose budding rap career kicked up a notch after a fateful meeting with Lil Yachty-affiliate K$upreme in 2015 — “Ever since that first day, we were just locked in,” he told me. Despite intermittent periods of incarceration over the past nine years, his discography to date includes collaborations with Duwap Kaine, Serane, and Trippie Redd, plus production by a host of SoundCloud stalwarts from Al Chapo and Dolan Beatz to SenseiATL and Cash Cache. Now, his creative trust with Evilgiane has yielded a handful of the pair’s best songs to date across a pithy mixtape that never slips below “pretty good.”
Evilgiane’s production style reflects an omnivorous musical appetite, but you could reductively triangulate his beats here as an amalgam of Atlanta trap, New York sample drill, and SoundCloud plugg. Despite a scant 22-minute runtime, his work on EVILSLIME teases out various evocative pockets of sound to underscore Slimesito’s resolute rhymes. The drums can be muted or knock hard; the BPM ranges up and down. Sounds might be crisp and clear or blown out and fuzzy; melodies come in the form of solid synths or wispy samples.
Slimesito remains unflappable through it all, coolly stunting and sliding over and through the pocket. On “MONA LISA,” he attacks an evanescent drill beat, rattling off one-liners like, “My life so fast so I’m always speeding” and “Know I’m bad man so you know I’m like Frieza.” His voice is compressed almost as bad as Giane’s 808s on “12 02 93,” but Sito’s vocals are more than capable of standing up against titanic instrumentals on their own merit, as when they rip through the seething churn of “BRUISE WAYNE."
As a lyricist, Slimesito is generally uninterested in detail work and allusion, preferring to speak plainly about money, bitches, and guns. Combined with the gravitas of his husky baritone, this aversion to metaphor and over-eloquence underscores the impish wordplay of Slimesito’s nimble flows. This comes through brightest on tape closer “DR EVIL,” where Sito pinballs off the sproingy instrumental: “I got a plug you know he came from Cuba but he still illegal / I’m hopping out a foreign it’s all white, man I can’t do no rentals.”
Or take the slower paced Eera-coprod “RIGHT OR WRONG,” where Slimesito deploys a similar “every line rhymes” structure as his verses on “MAKE IT HOME.” “I’m fucking on this bitch I know the hoe sprung, got big choppers man I feel like Saddam,” he raps nonchalantly. “Up in the trenches and you know I’m trapping, I be doing magic I ain’t waving no wand.” His sinuous flows and undulating turns of phrase twist simple rhymes into rhythmic earworms. “I was just locked up, I was reading through Psalms / I’ma slide for the gang, I don’t care if they wrong,” he sighs on the hook, dependable and unyielding.
