Rap Blog: Lazer Dim 700 raps in the prophetic perfect tense

Rap Blog is a weekly showcase of a standout rap song.

Like many of his contemporaries, Gen Z rapper Lazer Dim 700 records most of his music on his phone via Apple earbuds and the BandLab app. Even now, when he goes “viral every week” as one of the hottest underground artists in Atlanta, he’s sticking to his roots — after walking into a Twitch stream with PlaqueBoyMax last week, he announced he had just been recording a song in the back of the Uber. “What’s the craziest place you’ve made a song?” Max inquires. Lazer pauses to think. “Drivin’ on the highway, prolly.”

Lazer Dim 700 sounds like Young Nudy hitting a blinker before stepping into the booth. He generally raps over unholy 808s and gurgling bass seemingly tailormade to wound subwoofers. “Trap so old gotta run out the house when I play my music so the roof don’t fall on me,” goes one typically logorrheic line on the earth-shaking “Tony Dim.”

The spontaneity of Lazer Dim 700’s creative process belies the careful pruning and sharpening underpinning these brief, vigorous songs. Consider his March 2023 mixtape 8890, slower paced and far less visceral: he hasn’t quite found the “dark plugg” sound that has become his bread and butter, and his bars lacked the squirrely energy they carry now. Just a year later, Lazer’s debut album Injoy stretched an even more fried aesthetic across 15 thought-obliterating tracks, his flows far more agile and surefooted. These songs are short and spur of the moment, but they aren’t sketches or semi-baked. And while some naysayers have dismissed his music as gimmicky, the “gimmick” seems more like committing to a signature style.

The bulk of Lazer Dim’s discography is low-end bruisers, but he sounds especially exciting when he steps out of that zone, whether on February pluggnb jam “Asian Rock” or punching in again and again over a “hoodtrap xaviersobased emotional jerk type beat” on last week’s “Laced Max.” The new jerk music, spearheaded by the likes of Yhapojj, Nettspend, and yes, Xaviersobased, hinges on stuttering snares that rush forward, technically bearing no sonic relation to the jerk music of late-2000s California. The climbing synths of “Laced Max” are a swarming bed for some of Lazer’s more lucid raps to date, no matter if the “Florida zaza got me geeked, got me out my brain.” He and Max are peer pressuring each other to get crossfaded; he’s got shows booked every weekend; there are a number of beautiful women in his life, herein referred to as “FineShyt,” who are “actin’ lame” pretending they aren’t freaks, etcetera. At the very start of the song, after a few signature “fawkkkk”s, Lazer says, “when they get done, they gon’ play this back,” because he knows you will.