“I don’t wish to inform you what I’m feeling,” Anysia Kym sings on “Take a look at Your Persistence,” and for some time, she would possibly were chatting with us. The primary few years of her profession have been spent taking part in drums for Blair, a Brooklyn band that braved cramped practice session areas by way of day and threw presentations with heavyweights like Wiki by way of evening. Since departing the crowd in 2022, she’s lugged her percussive penchant into ethereal, otherworldly territory—much less excited about fringe rock’s fucked-up realities, and extra infatuated with the hazy hypnagogia that strings shabby days in combination. On 2022’s Soliloquy and 2023’s Power Delicate, she tossed clever alley-oops to the likes of MIKE, Niontay, and Jadasea, atmosphere the desk for a few of her collaborators’ maximum psyched-out performs. After years of being a pass-first manufacturer, Truest marks her first foray into natural scoring—solo tracks, just one function—and presentations flashes of a celeb within the making.
If Kym’s discography is a number of dreamscapes, the songs on Truest are lucid: Now not observing different characters courageous her worlds, she waltzes thru the home she’s spent years setting up. Like a lot of her previous paintings, those songs come from a spot of wistful longing; in contrast to the rest she’s launched prior to, they highlight Kym’s making a song voice, which claims a richly deserved spot in her woozy global. Album opener “Hesitations (Intro)” remembers dreamy R&B contemporaries like Liv.e and keiyaA, modulating and multiplying Kym’s murmurs to compare the “pale,” “sedated” state she sketches out. Her chops—actually, chops—as a manufacturer by way of now are acquainted, however she foregrounds them in sinuous new shapes. “Take a look at Your Persistence” starts as a head-bopping saunter, till, inside of two mins, Kym is gliding over a breakcore beat-switch, the way in which psychedelics would possibly make you float over dirty earth. “I’m satisfied that this might be interesting,” she sings. She isn’t improper.
Truest is the primary Kym free up to function more than one manufacturers but even so herself, which makes for compelling, if ordinary, extensions of her palette. The 454-produced “Pool of Lifestyles” is rapid and futurist, a groove-heavy Goldilocks zone between FAST TRAX 3 and The Velvet Rope—image Janet Jackson within the studio with Nintendo devs. Skater-slash-rapper Na-Kel Smith has lengthy appreciated pitched-up vocals and brash bass; over his frenetic beat for “Owed2Me,” Kym’s voice is in tinnitus territory, no longer controlling chaos such a lot as contributing to it. However as tripped-out as it’s, and disarming as it can be for longtime listeners, it’s promising to look her take new dangers, exploring others’ ingenious worlds as a substitute of shrinking again into her personal. Between Blair and now, she’s lived a couple of other inventive lives: punk-adjacent drummer, prolific hip-hop manufacturer, soulful R&B singer. Seeing her wonder isn’t essentially sudden.
