We were supposed to have reached the singularity by now, no? That place where the underground scenes that were born in opposition to the mainstream excess of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s would, through the Internet, come to rest comfortably next to, and inside of, pop. The old distinctions were meant to be relics; now that anyone can get anything at any time, hierarchies were doomed. Right?
Yes and no. More no than you’d think.
There didn’t appear to be any seismic shifts when the production collective Future Brown released its debut single, “Wanna Party,” featuring the polyvalent Chicago singer-rapper Tink, about a year and a half ago. It was just another creamy-and-scratchy collaboration between vocalist and producers, a song that seemed destined to remain small but great, and that was that.
That it took this long for Future Brown to arrive with its self-titled debut album, released this week on Warp, didn’t help. This is in part because Future Brown’s musicians are all successful in their own right: Daniel Pineda and Asma Maroof make up Nguzunguzu, a production and D.J. duo with global appetite and a long stretch of impressive EPs; Fatima Al Qadiri is both a musician and a visual artist; and J-Cush runs the influential label Lit City Trax, home for boundary-pushers in a range of dance floor subgenres.
They’ve been widely heard and quietly influential. So the fact that there’s still something obscure about their first album as Future Brown is absurd. These producers have a keen ear for rollicking production that still emphasizes melody; they listen widely and borrow structural elements from a host of styles and use them fluently, even when in unconventional ways.
Their preoccupations on this excellent album are, more or less, UK grime and Chicago hip-hop, with flashes of the Caribbean. The beats are dirty, full of skronk and screech. And yet there is a universality to this album, which also signals a set of aesthetics that once felt decidedly outsider is continuing to normalize, an extension of a long legacy.
The last decade or so has been littered with countless examples of the disintegration of longstanding walls, especially between hip-hop and electronic music, but really between hip-hop and everything. Think about the Hollertronix mixes and M.I.A. performing with T.I., Jay Z, Lil Wayne and Kanye West; think about Mr. West working with Hudson Mohawke and Arca on his “Yeezus” album; think about how Southern hip-hop production formed the template for the club music crossover sound called trap, and how the sharing is beginning to go both ways.
These moments are all, in their way, cousins to Future Brown, though its music has more grit, more tension, more flair. When producing for grime rappers like Riko Dan or Roachee, Future Brown moves at a breathless pace. “Big Homie” features Sicko Mobb, a breakout duo from Chicago’s bop movement, and Future Brown builds what almost sounds like a digital calypso track to complement their chirpy vocals.
And then there’s “Room 302,” which also features Tink, and which could almost be a Tinashe song thanks to its woozy sort of eroticism.
Tink is part of the abundance of powerful female talent on this album, which also features the long overlooked rapper Shawnna on “Talkin Bandz,” the dancehall artist Timberlee on “No Apology,” the nimble rapper 3D Na’Tee on “MVP,” and Maluca on “Vernáculo,” which takes the digital vocal processing that’s overwhelmed reggaeton in recent years and softens it, less as a cudgel and more as a cushion.
Despite the quiet radicalism of this album, the refinement with which Future Brown approaches its collaborators and their varying styles doesn’t mark this troupe as dissenters. Instead, these producers understand that everything is collapsing and that sonic tides are starting to move naturally in their direction.
Take Tink. She’s now at work on her major-label debut album with the help of Timbaland, one of hip-hop’s true futurists, back from before it was fashionable. Perhaps he will be finishing work that Future Brown started. Perhaps down the line, Future Brown will be its own finishing school.
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