Kojo Kay’s MORETHINK hits like a shimmering anxiousness assault with a beat far too satisfying for a music about overthinking. It’s catchy, stressed and surprisingly danceable.
This music has the emo-rap vitality of MGK and Trippie Redd’s 2024 sadboy EP working by it, solely pushed right into a brighter, extra danceable setting.
The bass is stressed. Sampled bells flicker by the beat whereas Kojo’s distorted vocal synths bend round his voice. There’s nervous vitality in every single place, however the music by no means loses its bounce.
MORETHINK takes its identify from precisely what Kojo Kay is caught doing: considering an excessive amount of and caring an excessive amount of about different individuals’s opinions. A primary-generation Canadian-American born in Brooklyn and raised in Vancouver, with roots stretching from Uganda to Ghana, Kay has spent a lot of his music crossing regional and style traces. This time, social anxiousness is sitting on the entrance of it.
That is the fifth launch from Kay’s self-produced debut mixtape TONEBOW. As he completely informed Neon Music: “this music is the summer season anthem for the anxious, simply do the factor, simply strive the factor, in the event you keep endlessly centered on another person’s opinion you’ll finally hate your individual opinion of your self.”
There’s precedent for this in Kay’s writing. His debut single, “The Boyz All Went To Jupiter,” hid heavier concepts about shared expertise and stagnation behind playful wordplay. MORETHINK isn’t coy about what’s bothering him.
The lyrics pull in two instructions: “I’ve been spherical n spherical / you helped me get unstuck / so you’ll be able to maintain me down / however are you able to maintain me up.” The one that as soon as helped them transfer ahead could now be the one holding them again. That contradiction carries into “I miss it the way in which you by no means cared / and I kinda miss the gap the way in which you was by no means there,” the place even emotional neglect has grow to be a consolation zone.
Kojo Kay produced “MORETHINK” himself, refining it together with his mentor, Juno Award-winning engineer Jamie Kuse. Samples of percussion from his East and West African roots sit inside a groove formed by his North American upbringing. The drums have a right away bodily pull, whereas distorted vocal synths blur round them, a manufacturing trait that has grow to be a part of Kojo’s sound.
Kojo Kay stopped releasing music in 2022 and spent the intervening years engaged on his sound and artist growth. TONEBOW might be his debut impartial mixtape, and MORETHINK provides indication of the place these years went.
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