Lost Kingz

Tha God Fahim hasn’t been shy about meeting the marketplace: Since starting to put music out in the mid-2010s, he’s barely let a month go by without releasing something, whether collaborative, instrumental, as producer, MC, or both. The generosity is candid: He can be hard, he can be gentle, he can be gleefully ignorant and mystically contemplative. (For an introduction to all sides at once, check out the 2017 compilation *Dump Goat*.) *Lost Kingz* leans toward the more thoughtful side of his output, an exercise in dusty, loop-based boom-bap that serves hard lessons with the weathered temperance of a dude in no real hurry. (Were his assumed lineage not clear here, he closes things out with a track called “Cash Rulez”; sample lyric: “It’s pay me now/Or pay me now.”) Not that Fahim is full throwback; if anything, the heat in his music is how he manages to balance the conservative and experimental, a quality most evident on two features with regular collaborator Mach-Hommy, “Blade Fordge” and “Play Ground Legend.”