Carrot season

The defining moment for Phiik and Lungs so far remains a grainy video of the duo standing in front of racks of T-shirts in a Hoboken vintage store, rapping like their lives depended on it. As a noose unrolls and a gruff voice shouts, “What the hell is good,” two boyish-looking white guys appear, black hoods pulled over their faces. Lungs, whose blond eyebrows and eyelashes intensify his unrelenting stare, beat like a wartime Morse code transmission, warning of an impending anxiety attack. His lean frame is almost alien. he slaps a skinny pointer on each syllable to ensure the doomsday message sinks in. Behind him, Phiik thrashes as if sidelined AND1 funneloccasionally projecting lengthwise. When he gets up, he darts into the mic, immediately unleashing a percussive flow that ripples and splashes like raindrops on a drum head. “Life is anything but a dream,” he spits, “and I'm foaming at the mouth.”

The video, which was shot for Top Shelf Premium's Freestyle Off Top series, captures the sheer intensity of Phiik and Lungs as a duo. Their chemistry comes easily. Both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since high school, sharing an admiration for early Def Jux and Wu-Tang records. In 2014, Lungs joined Tase Grip, the New York collective founded by AKAI SOLO. Feek quickly followed suit. Theirs is saturated with film, dusty-but-digital sound, fresh and immediate but strikingly out of time. The four entries in the pair album/another-planet-phiik-x-lungs-tape-prod-by-lonesword” class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://7deadlung7.bandcamp.com/album/another-planet-phiik-x-lungs-tape-prod-by-lonesword"}” href=”https://7deadlung7.bandcamp.com/album/another-planet-phiik-x-lungs-tape-prod-by-lonesword” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Another planet The tracks, all produced by Lungs himself under the moniker LoneSword, are full of frenetic, fantastical vibes over distressed samples and the occasional fragile drum loop. On Another planet 4the two pushed their wacky flows further than before, partly to see if they could, but mostly, as Feek put it. Wheel notes podcast, to “beat them over the head”.

Houston producer Olasegun runs the boards on their new album Carrot seasondelivering sunny, loungy beats full of vibratos, chorused guitars and crisp Pete Rock snares. It's still very insular music, a mesmerizing deluge of internal rhymes and intricately arranged syllables, surely the product of 24-hour recording and bottomless bags of weed. But rappers have more fully developed the contours of their voices, adding shading and depth to what might otherwise come across as exhaustingly mechanical.

Much of the record's buoyancy comes from Phiik and Lungs' palpable love of the boat. It is clear that both are committed to rap as a practice, fascinated by the mechanics and flexibility of language (in the same Wheel notes interview, Phiik recalls seeing a garbage bag full of Lungs' rhyming books, every page filled to the brim). Lungs still hits like a film print, but finds his areas to give into his once rigid rhythm. On songs like “Who // Eagle Eye” and “Kurt McBurt,” he unfreezes his crackling monotone with a soft glare, giving his punctuated lines a little more space. Phiik's flow is flexible, often graceful, bouncing between drums like protons in search of negative charge. He'll fixate on a particular sound and observe it from all angles, as in “Daily Mode:” “Sunrises with nothing but psilocybin and simple silence/I'm breaking down the science behind waking a sleeping giant.”