skaiwater. Photo by David Dickenson
Rap Blog is a weekly showcase of a standout rap song.
skaiwater is letting work get in the way. “I’ve been working overtime, babe / Don’t fuck him ’cause you miss me.” Laying the stakes so barely is nothing new for the British rapper-producer, whose album #gigi was our favorite of 2024 precisely for their balance of the immediate and the vivid. Few producers working the outer limits of pop and hip-hop can match skaiwater’s production chops on that album, and “pop” takes things even further: what if, the song posits, ’90s Björk peered even further into the future and discovered a time when blistered underground rap from Atlanta had spread across the globe?
Co-produced by skaiwater with Elkan, okdyl, and anca trio plus one, “pop” begins like one of #gigi‘s ballad moments, the kind that gave serious weight to skai’s ambitions to be “the Drake sequel.” Things are more bespoke than your bog standard follow-up, though Electric guitar as cool as a beachside breeze grazes over trap 808s dancing so frantically, they sound liable to fall off the DAW grid they were programmed on. skai keeps the energy in tune at first, keeping their raps swaggy yet pleading, before a kick drum pulled from dark plugg’s deepest regions blows the entire track up — what was once something you could very nearly see Camilla Cabello guesting on is now in its own universe.
Fans and newcomers alike will swoon over the song’s orchestral elements, and rightfully so. The pitched-up vocal on the hook beseeches “Where did I go?” interweaving with strings that start tentative at first then soon place the listener front and center in skaiwater’s hearts, its chambers now resembling a concert hall. skaiwater may be overworking to their own expense, but with results like “pop,” it’s hard to argue that it’s not paying off.
