A rapper, a streamer, and a leaker step right into a car. Who’s sitting behind the wheel?
OsamaSon may in all probability let you know. En path to the most important launch of his younger profession, the 21-year-old spitfire has been using shotgun. The quantity of his music that’s leaked up to now 12 months pressured a number of delays for his extremely anticipated third album, Leap Out. Osama’s followers spent 2024 begging for official variations of songs meant to remain personal, songs that may’ve gone on the album if solely leakers hadn’t already launched them. Final summer time, Osama pulled up on Kick streamer BruceDropEmOff for a livestream and witnessed a track leak in actual time. Simply three weeks earlier, he’d had 400 songs leaked in a single go. And it’s not for no motive: After breaking out with two back-to-back initiatives, 2023’s Osama Season and Flex Musix, the South Carolina rapper has change into the figurehead of post-COVID SoundCloud—a high-octane, 808-driven destructionist. Songs like “Trenches” are the explanation why iPhones include headphone warnings; the onslaught of bass paired with OsamaSon’s strained, exigent punch-ins are a match made in hell (that’s a praise).
Since rising two summers in the past, Osama’s not-so-discreet adulation for Playboi Carti has been a topic of scrutiny. The affect manifests in his music, in outdated visualizers, and cowl artwork; some have even in contrast their ’match pics. However in the identical means that Money Carti as soon as used Chief Keef’s sound as a launchpad, Osama melds his favourite rapper’s early echoic staccato into one thing extra corrosive. There’s a skinny line between mimicry and reinvention, and OsamaSon has step by step nudged previous the edge. On Leap Out, his sound is as distinct because it’s ever been, leading to a few of his most bone-shattering work to this point. At 18 tracks, the album can at instances really feel exhausting, however its torrential downpour of synths and 808s is finally rewarding.
Carnage propagates in each crevice of this report. The seismic jolt of “Idiot,” the demented showmanship of “Spherical of Applause”; it’s all brazen by design. If the drums sound like they’re suffocating the combination, it’s as a result of they’re imagined to. When the beats crackle on “GTFO the Room” or “Mufasa,” I really feel like a child in Florida once more, watching SUVs slide by with audio system so loud you might really feel the music greater than you might hear it. Is it jarring? Positive, possibly. However all I bear in mind considering again then was, “What track was that man taking part in?” A significant architect behind this sound and Leap Out’s general chaos is Charlotte-born beatsmith okay, the album’s government producer, who’s credited on 15 tracks. Virtually each rapper born after 9/11 has a track with that “okay is the toughest” tag on it (Glokk40spaz, xaviersobased, fakemink, YhapoJJ); final 12 months, he executive-produced Nettspend’s BAD ASS F*CKING KID. Inevitable is an understatement. On lead single “The Entire World Is Free,” okay presents Osama with the brightest, most forward-thinking piece in his catalog: A feverish, polychromatic Skrillex flip utterly submerged by volcanic percussion.
