There’s a modest narrative to BAFK, which Nettspend tries to wrap up throughout the first 15 seconds. “It get bizarre rising up,” he gargles on the intro (it’s known as “Rising Up”) over footwork-y percussion and synth sounds that do type of channel Objective-era Bieber. “I’m nonetheless a lil’ bit infantile… However I ain’t no little one, bitch,” he squeals in AutoTune on “Tyla,” whose giddy lurch is plainly modeled after Chief Keef, as are blatant Sosa-isms like, “I’d get a tutor, simply to fuck the tutor.” There are even just a few gestures to the truth that he has mother and father, although they principally appear to work together by telephone. Maybe on the behest of some government or different, Nett was advised that an album wants a hook, so right here it’s: the story of a child arising on this loopy world, one which’s nearly condescending in its try at linear logic.
However within the album’s center stretch between “A$AP” and “Seashore leak,” one thing clicks. Over a Jersey membership mirage of an EvilGiane beat, Nettspend begins the latter with a couplet that claims all of it in seven phrases: “Medication in my drink/I fell asleep.” An inexplicably hilarious Grimes pattern on “Skipping Class”—a lantern to information the odd millennial listener down BAFK’s darkish path—makes a poignant backdrop for a scene the place the choice to half methods with a fellow truant (“Yeah, I’m completed skipping class with you”) hits more durable than the album’s many compelled Peter Pan-isms. There’s dizzy pleasure in the way in which the vowels roll off the tongue on an in any other case dumb line like “I simply chucked a pair bands at a dancer,” or the imagery Nett conjures in a while “F*CK CANCER” of a pair thousand pennies tossed right into a wishing nicely, earlier than a sickening off-hand comment (“I simply popped two tablets, hope it don’t fuck me over”) startles you again from the dream.
Perhaps you’re sufficiently old to recollect when critics known as Younger Thug “post-verbal” and questioned whether or not Chief Keef was probably autistic, or when the slur of “mumble rap” was weaponized in earnest—quaint reminders of the intuition to reject the brand new and unusual. However I’m not bought on the concept this delirious, dissociative, nihilistic music, which is difficult to even take into consideration in regular songwriting phrases, is consultant of the New Youth Sound of Right now. (After I requested a good friend’s teenage child if his classmates listened to Nettspend, he responded with an eye-roll: “That’s like, for emo youngsters who need to be mysterious.”) Nonetheless, it resonates when Nett encrypts his personal language (“We each received rather a lot to say/Talking in codes ‘trigger they may take heed to us,” he warbles on “A$AP”) or grapples with the boundaries of aura (“I attempt to clarify how I really feel, however I simply really feel it in my core,” from “Tommy”) or on “F*CK CANCER,” when he wonders, “What’s actual?” Nothing, principally. Subsequent query.