Review Summary: Do you know how many times I've thought about writing about the paper I'm writing on?
I don’t even know where to start with this thing. Calling cLOUDDEAD a hip-hop album feels reductive as hell. This record is a maze of voices, tape hiss, decayed samples, and half-lucid diary entries whispered from a hundred dreamstates away. It’s hip-hop in the same way a storm is “just wind.” Trying to articulate my feelings about this album has been something that I’ve come back to time and time again, unsatisfied and confused about how to proceed, but here goes:
From the very first track, “Apt. A,” you’re not listening so much as eavesdropping. There’s no clear narrative, no beats that stay put, no voices that try to guide you. Doseone and Why? dart in and out of scenes like unreliable narrators. They mumble, spit rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness nonsense, fall silent mid-thought. You can catch fragments — some of them poetic, some hilariously mundane — but stitching them into a big picture is like trying to rebuild a memory you only half-lived. And the thing is, that might be the whole point.
But it’s not just the opening track that defines this record — take “JimmyBreeze”, for example. That one plays like it was built out of static electricity and the mutterings of someone stuck inside a snow globe. The way it lurches from off-kilter Nintendo synths into those fragmented verses—it's like falling into a junk drawer of old cartoons, existential dread, and warped field recordings. There’s a moment where a beat kicks in and almost settles into something you can nod to… and then it just collapses again. Like the track knows what you want and refuses to give it to you straight. It’s those fleeting moments I’ve come to appreciate over time, because they afford the album greater longevity.
Then there’s “I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses Again”—maybe the closest this album gets to being accidentally beautiful. The melody is faint, ghostly, like it’s trying to remember itself. The voices feel more subdued here, like a lullaby from the bottom of a well. It’s still abstract, still strange, but there’s something more fragile in it — like the mask slips for a second and you catch a glimpse of something real and visceral underneath all the weird.
There’s an obsessive, hand-crafted feel to the production here. Odd Nosdam doesn’t build beats so much as dig them up. The whole record sounds dug out of some half-melted VHS tape you found in your dad’s garage. Snippets of conversations, stretched loops, bizarre effects — it all feels like the audio equivalent of sifting through a dusty box of someone else’s dreams. Everything’s decaying, beautiful, and on purpose. There’s so much detail baked into the static, and somehow it all sticks together, like the weirdest collage that still manages to make you feel something deep and unspeakable.
And that’s what really gets me. For how abstract and scattered this album is, it feels painfully human. These guys were in their early twenties when they made it, and you can hear every bit of that restlessness. The way it flips from childlike to paranoid, from funny to desolate, from playful to straight-up cosmic. This wasn’t a record slapped together to be “weird.” It sounds like three people who couldn’t sleep and decided to make something eternal out of their insomnia.
It’s also the kind of album that doesn’t let you in right away. You’ll play it once, feel confused, maybe even annoyed, and move on. Then (if you’re like me) you’ll come back months later and hear a totally different record. You’ll pick up on a loop you missed. A line that suddenly makes sense. A transition that clicks. It grows on you, like moss on an old wall. I don’t even know if I’ll ever “get” all of it — but the more I listen over the years, the more I want to.
For a debut album, this is ridiculous. It shouldn’t be this ambitious. It shouldn’t work. But it does. cLOUDDEAD isn’t just an album I admire. It’s one I’ve come to sort of worship, quietly, every time I put it on. It reminds me that music doesn’t need to follow rules to hit hard. Sometimes it just needs to feel like it had to be made — like something inside these guys would’ve rotted if they didn’t get it out.
And goddamn, am I glad they did.
