Phreshboyswag along with a few other artists is one of the most important modern rappers of the UK scene. Already gaining moderate popularity with earlier singles like Girls Pay for My Dick with fellow 1c member Tenkay, he quickly cemented himself as one the pioneers of the Jerk genre especially in the UK.
343434 opens with a short sample from a British documentary about party drugs, specifically stimulant mephedrone playfully known as meow meow or drone. Phresh's rapping on this and the entire mixtape is mumbled, with simple rhyme schemes and flows. He often uses punch-ins during verses which adds to the disorienting feeling of them. Complementing this is very densely hazy production, mostly handled by other 1c members. The sound here feels utterly hopeless, even ominous to a degree.
Hottie is a change of pace, with one of the hardest Jerk beats I've ever heard. The bass, like on a lot of the tracks, is especially distorted along with the snares.
Corny delves back into the heavy apathy of the intro, this time with more of a Dark Plugg beat which is a nice change of sound. There's a good variety of production styles present here, but always with the same crushing whirlwind of synths, hi-hats and everything else. The drug documentary continue throughout the rest of the tracklist, keeping the substance abuse hanging over the tape's whole mood.
Phresh raps about standard hedonism here, but there's an underlying sadness and existentialism in the background of many songs, occasionally bleeding into the foreground;
„
Sometimes I don't even know what this is even for“
-343434-
„I got too fucked up, laying in the dirt
You could say what you want, you were never her“
-like a bird-
It reveals an extra layer of depth to the record, present across the rest of his discography too. The depressive mist this album resides in akin to the cigarette smoke on its cover. Production-wise it almost gets Industrial with how dizzying it all gets, like on Can't get enough when the verse suddenly speeds up, getting more distorted.
Thematically this release reminds me a lot of Black Kray's classic 2013 mixtape Crack Cloud$ Over Arts Kitchen, paralleling the theme of addiction.
Dragggggggggggd is a strange synth-focused outro beat produced by Phreshboy himself, I don't mind it on its own but it doesn't really work as a send-off. Would've been interesting to hear him rap on it instead.
Rock Bottom is Phreshboyswag's defining work, showing off multiple facets of his life in varying levels of vulnerability all to the backdrop of some of the most interesting, noisy production of the underground. It resides in a realm of self-hatred most of his peers never venture into. This and a lot of his singles are highlights of the time period they released during, some of which I'll definitely review eventually.
9/10
- kreyzi
stillbeaches' rating: 6.5
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