Bands will always sound like this: jangly and raw, infatuated with their own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves in their haste to convey a botanic garden’s worth of full-bloom feelings. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of power pop that understands, deeply, that the genre’s only goal should be to make age-old feelings like love and longing sound thrilling and new. It succeeds and surpasses that goal: Familiar but finely tuned, it’s likely to remind you of whatever music felt most romantic to you when you were growing up. For me, that’s Royal Headache and the Beatles and Hunx and His Punx and Girls; for you, maybe the Kinks or Cleaners From Venus or Alvvays. The album’s recombinant DNA is an asset—or, at the very least, not a hindrance—because 20-year-old Slater is also one of contemporary indie-rock’s sharpest pop songwriters, each of the record’s 14 songs containing its own cosmos of urgent choruses and natty phrases and artfully scrawled riffs. Radio DDR earns its comparison points, slamming you so hard and so frequently with scream-a-long hooks that it feels like a greatest-hits collection.
In addition to his duties in Sharp Pins, Slater is a lynchpin of Chicago’s young, fruitful guitar band scene: He runs a zine called Hallogallo that shares its name with a prolific DIY collective that also includes Horsegirl, Post Office Winter, and Slater’s other bands, Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe. He’s also obsessed with youth culture, and to read him talk about its centrality in his life—“the only thing that I know I can do in the world is make youth spaces,” he says—unlocks a layer of meaning within Radio DDR. These songs are about love, by and large, but they also ache with the notion that certain parts of life will inevitably slip away. They lurch forward urgently, like Slater is trying to bottle the feeling of being young before the fountain runs dry.
Is it frustrating that society and pop culture writ large centers around Being Young? Maybe, but it’s an easier pill to swallow when it tastes this good. The halting boogie of “You Have A Way” is a vortex of anxieties and boredoms that can boil down to one lyric—“Can I find a time with you?” Meanwhile, Slater chases “the seconds/I can’t suspend anymore” on the frantic, anthemic garage barnstormer “Is It Better.” “I Can’t Stop” sounds like something Royal Headache’s Shogun might have made in his teenage bedroom, and one repeated lyric makes this theme even more explicit: “I don’t wanna get older no more.”
All of Radio DDR carries this feeling of racing against the clock, which is part of the (perhaps oxymoronic) appeal: Slater’s lyrics reflect the invincibility and assuredness of youth, but his melodies are shot through with the melancholy that comes with getting older and realizing that the infallibility of your late teens and early 20s is just another ephemeral feeling. Slater makes these feelings sound impossibly potent: The “ahh-ahh-ahh” on “Storma Lee” is wistful enough to cause palpitations in even the sturdiest heart; when he sings “If I was ever lonely/Oh, how it’d tear me apart,” hitting those last three words with a glam swagger, you want to laugh at the hubris and the excitement of it all. This contradictory, lovestruck aura fills every corner of Radio DDR; it’s immensely gratifying to listen and remember that bands like Sharp Pins will keep striving to capture these ineffable feelings as long as people are having them. (Which is to say: forever.)
During a 2008 interview, Prodigy of Mobb Deep was asked if he ever feared death. Mortality followed him in every lyric he delivered, and few artists could capture that deep chill you feel when survival becomes part of your everyday life. His response carried the same tough energy that defined him, shaped by the reality of Queensbridge: “Every day I wake up like, ‘This might be my last day, and I’m not scared of it.’ I’m never scared to bite my tongue about something, or to come out and speak about something. Like, I ain’t scared of death. What you gonna do to me?”
Nine years later, at only 42, he passed away in a way that felt both tragic and strangely ordinary. While on tour with Havoc in Las Vegas, he was hospitalized for complications tied to his lifelong struggle with sickle cell anemia. There, he accidentally choked while eating alone and died. (His family would later file a wrongful death lawsuit against the hospital.)
Havoc spent years mourning his brother and bandmate, unsure how to properly honor him through music. “You wanna do something to send your comrade off with a 21-gun salute…because he deserves that,” he said recently on the Bootleg Kev podcast. With help from longtime collaborator the Alchemist, Havoc pieced together Infinite, Mobb Deep’s ninth album and part of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series. It marks the first posthumous release in the collection, which always comes with its own challenges. Yet Infinite flows as smoothly as any project of its kind. For better and worse, it feels like an album the duo could’ve released after 2014’s somewhat forgettable The Infamous Mobb Deep, an update to their signature gritty sound with a few hints of modern polish.
On paper, it feels like everything has been rewound. Aside from a brief COVID reference and one cringey Havoc line about getting canceled for a joke about chromosomes, most of the lyrics are either locked in time (“Taj Mahal” references the old Trump casino) or so universal they could live anywhere. Instead of calling on a team of producers like they did for Infamous, Havoc handles 11 of the 15 tracks himself, with Alchemist revisiting the dirty, menacing textures he perfected on Murda Muzik and Infamy for the remaining four.
The strongest Havoc beats from Mobb Deep’s golden era twisted familiar sounds into something dangerous. That edge is still there on songs like “The M. The O. The B. The B.” and “Mr. Magik,” where the tension mixes with the quieter, stripped-down percussion style he used on Kanye’s The Life of Pablo. It gives the low-end even more power. Meanwhile, Alchemist falls back into the rugged rhythms that made his name — dusty drums and echoing samples. The shimmering haze of “Taj Mahal” feels like something from an old Street Sweepers mixtape, while “Score Points” and “My Era” would fit perfectly on one of his earlier collaborations with Prodigy.
Prodigy is present on every track, never halfway in. He raps at least one verse on each song and even takes on some of the hooks. His voice is as cold and sharp as ever (“RIP, you can’t son me/My pop’s dead,” he spits on “My Era”), even when his writing circles back to familiar themes. There are still small gaps here and there, but Havoc and Alchemist treat his vocals with care. What matters most is that the bond between Havoc and Prodigy still feels unbroken. They were never flashy lyricists or complex writers — their power came from directness, from how rooted they stayed in LeFrak City no matter how far their fame reached. “Mr. Magik” gets closest to that old-school Mobb Deep feel, especially when they pass the mic back and forth, going at rivals, dodging CIA agents, and spending nights with mistresses. The same goes for “Easy Bruh,” a song driven by drums, faint piano keys, sirens, and some of Prodigy’s sharpest lines on the album (“Niggas mad? Put a cape on ’em/Now they super mad” actually made me laugh out loud). At its best, Infinite feels effortless, Mobb Deep comfortable in their seasoned, world-weary selves.
Things drift off when the production stretches too far or leans toward trends. Some guest spots make perfect sense, like Big Noyd showing up on “The M. The O. The B. The B.” with his trademark nasal intensity, or Ghostface and Raekwon bringing color and life to “Clear Black Nights.” But the Clipse feature on “Look at Me” feels more trendy than meaningful, and Nas, another close ally, drops in with one of those standard Mass Appeal-style verses that sound recycled from his recent albums. “Down For You,” which flips Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” into a hard-hitting love track, is a welcome addition to Mobb Deep’s catalog of street romance. Still, it loses impact when it reappears later on, this time swapping Jorja Smith’s hook for one by H.E.R. I can understand the decision, the beat goes hard — but it’s hard to take Nas seriously when he’s rapping about keeping a side chick like Tony Soprano. It’s one of the few moments that feels forced, and because there are so few, they stand out more.
Posthumous rap albums in the last decade have often been tangled in questions of control and exploitation. Thankfully, Infinite avoids those traps. It doesn’t carry the awkward tension that surrounded Gang Starr’s One of The Best Yet, nor does it feel stitched together the way DMX’s Exodus did. It never feels like Havoc or anyone else is cashing in on Prodigy’s legacy. In fact, it’s moving to hear them side by side again, even when Prodigy’s words hit too close, meditating on death while “staring up at the cosmos” on “Pour The Henny,” or dodging enemies both real and imagined as he gambles in Atlantic City. Still, much of the album feels like a return to familiar ground, reworking echoes of their strongest years. There are no moments that reach the levels of The Infamous or Hell on Earth, but Infinite does succeed in giving one of hip-hop’s greatest duos one final, heartfelt ride.
