There’s something of a chasm between the respective styles employed by Larry June and 2 Chainz. On one side of the scale sits June as the everyman iconoclast, whose nonchalant approach—spitting simple flexes and straightforward routines over post-hyphy beats and serene loops—barely gets his heart rate above resting. Staring across from him is 2 Chainz as trap’s resident elder statesman, who’s made his bones in the sub-genre wielding his larger-than-life presence with absurdity and spontaneity. So at first, Life Is Beautiful, a collaboration featuring the duo and the Alchemist, seems like an improbable logic problem: an album that seeks to enjoin a square peg with a round hole.
For years now, the Alchemist has been steadily transitioning away from crafting the bone-shuddering boom-bap beats of his early career and toward furnishing dreamscapes with psychedelic loops and minimal effects. It has cemented the Beverly Hills-raised legend as a go-to producer for indie darlings and mainstream stars alike, weaving brilliant albums with Boldy James, Earl Sweatshirt, and Roc Marciano, tinkering and experimenting to tailor to his collaborators’ idiosyncrasies. But Life Is Beautiful’s three-body problem proves to be a tad more difficult. Catering to June’s laid-back temperament, the triumvirate play around in a breezy, luxurious atmosphere (not unlike that of the Alchemist’s sauntering, 2023 EP, Flying High). Yet, the competency can feel a tad underwhelming at times, as though you can feel the meat being left on the bone by the reduced hunger.
It mirrors the strategy employed on The Great Escape, the 2023 link-up between June and the Alchemist. A placid haze settles over the 37-minute runtime of Life Is Beautiful, turning the production into an easy-listening exercise: You can almost hear the waves lapping in the background of “I Been” as the synths take control, or feel yourself drifting away to the serene vocal sample (which sounds eerily reminiscent of those old Italian movie theme songs) on the opener “Munyon Canyon.” In terms of beat selection, there are sparse callbacks to the Alchemist’s boom-bap tendencies—the mafioso piano loop on “Colossal” rattles around in the listener’s brain, while “Bad Choices” blares with its loud mix and screaming soul interpolation—but much of the production’s best moments hinge on making that drumless minimalism stretch for June and 2 Chainz. Little more than a fluttering flute sample fills the atmosphere on “Life Is Beautiful,” providing a brilliant foil to the pair’s deep tenors as they celebrate their victories.
On paper, the tranquil churn of Life Is Beautiful is set for June to take reins, yet it’s clear from the very outset that 2 Chainz is the driving force behind the project’s momentum. With a less challenging production environment, June largely rests on his magnetic relatability instead of employing inspired deliveries, causing some of his musings—on picking up bagels with cream cheese or practicing calisthenics, for example—to register as tepid. The onus falls upon 2 Chainz to imbue the record with energy via sparks of hysterical spontaneity. He gleefully boasts about how “intermittent fasting with the burpees” has him slimmed down on “Life Is Beautiful,” and describes requiring two-step verification before embarking upon sexual relations on “Jean Prouvé.” Rarely does that liveliness reach June by osmosis—though when it does, like when the San Francisco rapper blisters through his verse on “Epiphany,” it’s invigorating. In turn, the stretches where 2 Chainz takes his foot off the pedal feel sanded down.
That sort of mundanity represents the other side of the coin for the Alchemist’s recent collaboration albums. When the stakes are lowered, as they are here, Alchemist is more akin to a floor-raiser than the virtuoso who helps MCs shatter expectations, sometimes sacrificing innovation in lieu of quality assurance. Life Is Beautiful is a microcosm of that balancing act, and it pulls it off moderately well, fighting to remain distinct from the gravitational pull of the “Introspective Dad Rap” label that could bulldoze over the music’s intricacies. “Mindin’ my business, drinkin’ water, doin’ crunches/Gettin’ paid for discussions over Alchemist production,” 2 Chainz boasts on “I Been,” pinning his placement over Alchemist beats as a legacy career achievement, a relaxed victory lap that doesn’t ask for more than he’s willing to give.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
