Glock Season

*Glock Season*, the first mixtape released by the then-still-teenaged Memphis rapper Key Glock after signing to his older cousin Young Dolph’s esteemed Paper Route Empire imprint, is the kind of hybrid work some artists spend their whole career chasing. While the totalizing sound of drill was taking over Chicago’s hip-hop scene and Auto-Tuned melodies dominated Atlanta’s, Memphis stood nearly alone on the national stage, its pulsing club rap boiled down to strict essentials. With *Glock Season*, Key Glock showed the way that minimalism could be leveraged into the kind of widescreen autobiographical introduction that rappers have been trying to deliver since the genre’s beginnings. In fact, when it comes to Glock’s music being an unflinching reflection of himself, *Glock Season* includes a rule-proving exception. The simmering minor-key cut “Racks Today” pairs him with fellow Memphis artist Jay Fizzle, one of the only outside voices who would intrude on Glock’s entire solo catalog. This hermetically sealed worldview is by design—Glock’s writing style hinges on seemingly unrelated thoughts colliding against one another, their internal logic sustained precisely because the chain remains unbroken—and is sustained by his vocals which, even from this early stage, are constantly molting. On “Winning,” Glock moves seamlessly between a clipped, first-thought delivery and one that’s much more considered and fluid, each accentuating the qualities of the other. It’s an ambidextrousness that helps land songs like “Dig That,” where Montana Corleone and Sosa 808’s beat—ruminative piano against buried but propulsive drums—seems at first to be spinning in opposite directions. Glock is in some ways a classically minded punchline rapper (he quips at one point that, like Derrick Rose, he tore his ACL from balling too hard; athletes from bygone eras like Warren Sapp litter the lyrics sheets), but even this at times is made to feel like a conscious subversion of form, something to preoccupy the front of the mind while the real feelings are being worked out just beneath the surface.