There are not any accessible flights from Nottingham, England to Los Angeles. Not immediately, not ever. You’ll need to take a pair trains to London Heathrow first—a two-and-a-half hour journey forward of 11 extra hours of jet-borne purgatory. skaiwater is aware of this all too nicely. The British rapper-producer first left the Midlands in 2019, splitting their time between the U.S. and the UK earlier than making LA their everlasting residence. It was a enterprise choice: Their Auto-Tune-drenched, dance-rap melodrama was resonating much more in America than it had again residence. The best way they put it, “There’s not some huge cash to get [in England]” for the music they’re making. The success of “rain,” a mutated R&B ballad that was each irresistible and inescapable final yr, set the tone for the epistolary heartache of #gigi, their acclaimed LP, which married rage rap with pop, soul, and each regional subgenre you possibly can transfer your hips to. However beneath the music’s plain danceability lies a fractured spirit.
Their new mini-album, #mia (brief for Manic in America), acts as a religious successor to their lovelorn breakout, utilizing stadium rock and radio pop because the skeleton for full-blooded, 808-laden furor. Throughout 8 tracks in 23 minutes, skai continues to be calling out to a lover who can’t hear them, prostrating themselves within the identify of reciprocity. The demo of “pop” they quietly launched simply after #gigi felt like a bare-bones plea for consideration so particular that listening grew to become voyeuristic. From the bounce, a chiptuned choir harmonizes by means of skai’s plight like extras circling the protagonist in a musical. skai is wistful and stressed, pleading to their accomplice by means of motormouthed dissonance. “Don’t fuck him ’trigger you miss me,” they ask with out asking. The orchestral swells of the album model sound like heaven’s ready room. Even in all of its desperation, it’s lovely.
Relatively than sifting by means of genres like on #gigi, the manufacturing on #mia is firmly rooted in skai’s personal meld of rap-rock electronica. On “feral,” twangy acoustic licks slide by means of claps, snares, and face-scrunching bass like butter, like a postmodern take on Pluto X Child Pluto. The languid fuzz simmering on the bottom flooring of “maria” tears a web page from Duster’s Up to date Motion, every strum wallowing in static. “You don’t really feel the identical.” is constructed round jaunty shards of electrical guitar, however the monitor loses steam early when a cookie-cutter indie pop drum break barges in. That is #mia’s greatest pitfall: its incapability to sit down nonetheless. skaiwater’s music attracts persona from its eclecticism and unpredictability, however clunky mash-ups and beat switches maintain this report again. After “ur track” rumbles in with 808 thunderclouds and a scintillating synth lead, the stiff wall-of-sound guitar distortion jerks it astray.