After a summer’s worth of mystery and anticipation, Top Dawg Entertainment’s newest potential groundbreaker Lance Skiiiwalker has arrived with Introverted Intuition.
Once it was revealed that Skiiiwalker had signed with the label home to artists like Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q and SZA, expectations were immediately set sky-high for his debut project. Quality collaborations with Lamar and Q on “Untitled Four” and “Know Ya Wrong,” respectively, only compounded the hype.
Still, little had been discovered about Skiiiwalker leading up to the release of this LP. With its release it appears this was largely intentional.
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At the core of the album is an impenetrable, dark cloud that obscures the inner meaning and musicality of each of the artist’s tracks. This ends up being both good and bad.
It’s great because it encourages careful listening of each track. Skiiiwalker’s obscure lyrics and stripped down, yet melodious beats, seem to allude to a core meaning that needs to be unearthed by the listener. With each listen, it feels as if one is getting closer and closer to discovering the core truth of Skiiiwalker’s project without actually hearing anything different.
On the other hand, this harms the overall musicality of the project. While Skiiiwalker is great at creating tense sonic atmospheres filled with mystique, he’s rarely fleshes them out with the vitality needed to give them three dimensions. While the listening experience on this album is certainly intriguing, it’s rarely impactful.
The exception to this comes on the album’s last three tracks. On those tracks the curtain is pulled away and Skiiiwalker shows a lighter side that works in unison the airy atmosphere of the earlier parts of the LP with more fleshed out song-writing.
It must also be said that Skiiiwalker is a tremendous producer. Throughout the record he’s able to merge different acoustic and electric genres to create instrumentals that defy categorization.
There’s also a sense, however, that Skiiiwalker meant to be experimental on this project, but without the frantic energy needed to truly experiment. While he employs weighty themes like Christianity on tracks like “Forbidden Fruit,” he fails to do anything that hasn’t been done before. He also ties the project together with radio station skits that simply annoy rather than intrigue as they were intended.
If this project is any indication, it appears that Top Dawg has found the perfect role player to their superstars in Skiiiwalker. His ability to create unique, innovative sonic soundscapes will do nicely as settings for the exploits of artists like Kendrick.
But if he ever wants to come off the bench he’ll need to add another character to his own music: himself.
