070 Shake - Glitter EP

070 Shake
Glitter EP
2018
Spotify

You may not know 070 Shake, but if you have followed Kanye West's career what so ever you have undoubtedly heard her voice. 070 Shake was the standout star of Kanye's "Ghost Town" a song that absolutely soars when she steps on it. The New Jersey native racked up major streams on soundcloud which caught the attention of Kanye, who signed her shortly there after in 2017. Since then she has appeared on a number of his projects, but this is the first of her official mixtapes. Compared to other artists in the space 070 Shake follows many of the benchmarks soundcloud rap has set for itself. The vaguely rap, vaguely emo style is so popular today that it's infiltrated every aspect of pop. Her music really fills your ears and permeates everything around it, Her autotuned vocal somewhat Post Malone-ish, but with far better lyrical content. The problem with soundcloud rap is that at a point it became so damn repetitive. You can't just repeat "rockstar" 7,000 times and call it a song, but that is exactly what Post Malone did showing all the cracks that lay waiting in the young genre's exterior. 070 Shake does well to dispel some of those criticisms and allow her music to be unique all on it's own. However she does still suffer when all six of the tracks her sound kind of the same. All the tracks sit in the same lane, with none of them making you stand up and really take notice. A style shift at some point would shake the listener out of the daze she can lock you into at times. 

The emo shift in hip hop has been a strange one. From Lil Peep to Lil Uzi Vert more and more the sad bois are taking over. It's funny that it feels like every generation has their emo movement, and this is Gen Z's turn. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just sort of the way things go. These flows of culture from one place to another have played out in patterns throughout the history of popular music and we are really only now seeing what these kinds of changes look like in the long game. 070 Shake appears to be looking for something more substantial than high streaming numbers and a big twitter following, because this album takes some decently large swings. However she is going to need to put herself out there more and try something that isn't so directly tied with the music that the rest of the world is making right now. The potential is there, let's just see if she is able to truly harness it.

6.9 out of 10