Album Of The Week: Ryan Hemsworth Guilt Trips

Time to retire "cloud-rap." The term, coined by a friend of the site who would probably rather not be chained to it anymore, once served as a useful descriptor for a thing that was happening on rap's internet fringes. A few years ago, people like Lil B and Main Attrakionz stood out because their sound, drifting and dazzled and awash in new-age synth sounds and emotively hiccuping vocal samples, was so unlike anything else we were hearing in rap. But then it grew. In A$AP Rocky, cloud-rap found its first star. In the producer Clams Casino, it had its first auteur. And then the sound spread and dissolved and melted into rap's mainstream, until it was entirely subsumed into the greater whole. Is Drake cloud-rap? Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y? The Weeknd? Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, The Creator at their most chilled-out? You could, conceivably, slap the label onto any of them, which just underlines how little use it has right now. And now Ryan Hemsworth, the most important producer to come out of the cloud-rap internet underground since Clams Casino, has made an album that isn't particularly cloudy or particularly rappy. Guilt Trips, Hemsworth's official debut after a couple of years of underground rap beats and Soundcloud remixes, practically demands its own subgenre tag, and I have no idea what that tag is. Guilt Trips is, blessedly, its own thing.