Cilvia Demo

The previously Los Angeles-centered TDE crew's adoption of a Southern member isn't so strange. Since they already feel like a modern iteration of the Dungeon Family approach that has seeped into the second-generation Cali gangsta, finding an inverse in Isaiah Rashad makes perfect sense. He's an OutKast fan from the South who's also comfortable in the context of a West Coast that gave us Labcabincalifornia and Me Against the World the same year. While his BET Hip Hop Awards Cypher appearance last year was a bit of an advance notice, the abrupt arrival of his voice in full proves at least one thing: Top Dawg has scouts that'd make Billy Beane lose his damn mind.

Rashad's background draws from a few different sources. While he rode around Chattanooga bumping No Limit classics through the speakers of the '95 Civic he nicknamed “Cilvia”, he did so knowing that the real scene and all the networking opportunities to advance were some 120 miles down I-75 to Atlanta. His style wound up developing with the outside influence of already known artists, but laced with the personal, true-to-self approach that typically comes from having to impress peers and friends instead of a scene wracked with hypebeasts. And with the development that comes when your subject matter demands introspection from the get-go, Cilvia Demo is as much a revelation as labelmate Kendrick Lamar's breakthrough *Section.80—*only this time, there's also a good kid, m.A.A.d city to look up at and aspire to.

That may come in time, maybe sooner than we think; Cilvia Demo already shows an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. There isn't a clear delineation between Rashad's moments of struggle and his times of strength—these are songs where one typically tests the other, where Hennessey and Jagermeister are less the celebratory ingredients of VIP sections than the coping mechanisms for figuring shit out. Few lines seperate the verse-starting come-on “Baby, can you sucky on my dick/ I know it's big enough” and the admission “I done grown up for my child sake” in “Webbie Flow (U Like)," a song where his swagger and his responsibilities get tangled up in his own self-recognition. The vivid despair of “Heavenly Father", where the one point of hope in a litany of suicidal thoughts and dead-end burnout is the question of “If I give my story to the world/ I wonder if they'd book me for a show,” still persists in the mind when a tribute to the similarly introspective Scarface, “Brad Jordan",  has him spitting the rhetoric of invincibility. And there's a line on the title track where he worries about having his own kid look at him the same way he looked at his deadbeat dad; it hits even harder once you've taken in the lyrics about his own feelings about his father. It should all be instantly familiar to anyone dealing with “I'm 21, now what” introspection (or memories thereof).

His headspace comes through so strongly you could easily overlook that Rashad can also put together some fucking verses. There's a single line in the title track that could sum up why his lyrics sink in so deep—“'93 Til be cool for Emmett”—that packs the thematic merging of South and West, racist trauma and artistic resilience, oppressive violence and expressive freedom, all in six words. He can rattle off dense internals with double-meaning followups (“Soliloquy”'s line “Leave the bodies on the cul-de-sac, follow me the cult is back” opens the door for a Jim Jones meta-reference), he's got his share of punchlines (a pistol in “Menthol” “knock caps like it's senior year”), his hooks draw blood (“Tranquility for a Brutus/ And hard road for a Caesar”), and he mixes personal details and pop-culture namedrops so naturally that even his Vince Vaughn and Larry David shout-outs seem like matter-of-fact acknowledgements than celebrity punchlines.

As for his voice, Rashad's prone to conjuring up influences in a way that makes part of his stylistic blueprint clear. Along with the aforementioned Scarface shout-out, “West Savannah” makes the OutKast connection implicit; same for “R.I.P. Kevin Miller” and Master P. Throw in how he first started modeling his flow off a young Lil Wayne, and that's the base for a strong Southern itinerary that he's managed to make his own. He's turned those reference points into something more slippery and reflective, and whether his clear, subtly needling, percussive drawl is hyped up or worn down, he rides the beat with a sharp sense of timing. There are some occasional deliberate hitches in his flow that play up the unmediated, conversational yet still beat-driven cadence of his voice to an extent that it's hard to even break it down into component parts. It just is, and it can't and shouldn't be anything else.

At least a little of that could be the production talking, granted: the slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics. It draws from a downtempo vibe that swaps out Southern hip-hop's deep soul for noir jazz while retaining that certain cruising-speed dream-state glide. Post-Dirty South in the same way that previous TDE high points have been post-g-funk—indebted but transcendent—there's a consistent thread of deep, often heavily reverbed pianos and brittle yet steady off-kilter snares that make up for the South being the only American hip-hop region to never really give that whole Soulquarian thing a shot. That it pulls it off with a 10-producer committee full of relative unknowns is worth noting. Half of them have Cilvia Demo as their only Discogs credit, but their work stands out: Ross Vega's muted, melting-organ and screw-drum-lope opener “Hereditary”; Joseph Stranger's glow-bass 98 Dilla minimalism for the title cut; a grip of ethereal ghost-church beats by the Antydote (“Ronnie Drake”; “West Savannah”; “Banana”) that make him almost as much of a blindside breakout as the headliner.

Cilvia Demo ends with a remix of “Shot U Down", the name-maker that dropped last fall and remains the definitive moment of Rashad's career in a sort of “first result in Google autocomplete” kind of way. First single, last track—it's a fitting place for both, initially placing Rashad in an introductory context back in September and now, on this album, feeling like the culmination of a debut full-length that could go down as the best all year. The remix features some TDE co-signs in the form of Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q, who contribute strong verses in embattled gangsta/money hustler mode, respectively. They're a welcome connection to Rashad's new place in hip-hop, but they're also added attractions rather than skeptic-comforting legitimizers. Rashad's already the real thing, even if his strengths lie in coming to terms with how to turn that real thing into a righteous thing. Now that he's arrived, watching him hit his next destination's going to be exhilarating.