We all have regrets. One of mine is passing on “No Flex Zone.”
Back in 2014, when premieres were still a big deal in music blogging, I received an email from a publicist representing the new protégés of the ascendant Atlanta producer Mike WiLL Made-It. “The group is Rae Sremmurd, two young dudes, real-life brothers from Mississippi that have a ton of energy,” the guy wrote, gauging my interest in premiering the group’s new single. I was obsessed with Mike WiLL at the time — to read through his early production discography is to be transported back to a golden era for rap and R&B radio — so I eagerly clicked the link to listen to the song this guy was offering. But upon hearing Swae Lee’s voice careening across the track, my initial, unfortunate read was that he was doing Young Thug cosplay. I never wrote back.
I heard “No Flex Zone” many, many more times throughout 2014, and it did not take long before I revised my stance. The track was built on the cavernous, lurching bass ripples that had become Mike WiLL’s trademark by then, those glimmering bogs of low end that made hits like “Bandz A Make Her Dance” and “Mercy” and “Love Me” and “No Lie” and “Neva End” feel like they expanded outward to infinity. But here, WiLL expanded on that template with a jutting high-end melody that gave the beat an unhinged bounciness, like playing ping pong with tiny rubber balls. It was a savvy evolution catered to the strengths of these particular performers.
Within that environment, Swae Lee ran wild, sending his high-pitched vocals into piercing wailed contortions, rapid-fire syncopation, and bursts of melody too raw and electrifying to scan as Drake-style R&B hybridism. Yes, there was some resemblance to Thug, but the influence was no more pronounced than Thug’s own debt to Lil Wayne. The creative vitality was clear in the way Swae turned “They knooooow better!” into a proof-in-the-pudding hook. And with Slim Jxmmi’s welterweight growl providing the anchor that kept the song from floating away in the second verse, it was no wonder the track became Rae Sremmurd’s breakout single.
By the time they released their debut album SremmLife 10 years ago today, the duo had tacked on an even bigger 2014 hit with “No Type.” It was a sparse but booming production that let Swae further unspool his approach to melodious rap, pairing his snapping-elastic outbursts with the hypnotic qualities he’d later bring to songs like “Black Beatles” and “Unforgettable.” This time the foundation was a sequence of zonked keyboard chords that, in Rae Sremmurd’s hands, became the context for braggadocious lifestyle bars about how these guys are living much better than you and are happily getting with many kinds of women. Arriving at the tail end of rap’s MDMA phase, it had a dazed, hallucinatory quality to it, but the bleary-eyed aesthetic did little to tamp down on the celebratory feeling.
When SremmLife dropped, Rae Sremmurd had plenty to celebrate. The Brown brothers, Khalif (Swae Lee) and Aaquil (Slim Jxmmi), had been attempting to grind out a music career for years under various stage names when Mike WiLL Made-It took them under his wing, signing them to his EarDrummer label and executive producing their debut album. They looked like young teenagers, hence the constant Kriss Kross comparisons they faced, but both were in their early twenties when they blew up, having started this pursuit when they were young teens. They broke through under the banner of Rae Sremmurd, an ugly sequence of letters that at the time struck me as an extra degree of difficulty for the boys to overcome. (It’s Ear Drummers spelled backwards.) In hindsight, maybe the bizarre band name helped grab people’s attention. Or maybe when the music is this inventive, infectious, and fun, the moniker doesn’t matter.
SremmLife is not quite a “debut album as greatest hits album,” but when one of its many highlights is on, it exudes that kind of energy. Next in the procession was the music-box strip-club anthem “Throw Sum Mo,” which brought Nicki Minaj (in rarely seen less-is-more mode) and the aforementioned Young Thug into Rae Sremmurd’s giddy sound-world. It became another rap radio fixture, boasting a smartly deconstructed trap beat and the exact sort of melodic-tough-guy business Drake was taking straight to the bank at the time. Jxmmi gets his “actually, Big Boi was just as eccentric as André” moment when his opening verse breaks open from cool, collected hooks to near-anguished howls, and Swae’s sing-song word-picture of “Franklins, rainin’ on your body” is entrancing enough to feel like a mantra or incantation.
The last two singles, though, were where Swae flexed his gift for melody most emphatically. Nestled together at the center of the tracklist, “This Could Be Us” and “Come Get Her” present one of history’s most pleasant visions of trap as pop. The plinking-piano beat and meme-based premise might have rendered “This Could Be Us” corny crossover bait, but Rae Sremmurd, Mike WiLL, and the track’s lead producer Marz expertly rode the bleeding edge of good taste, ending up with a fluid, floaty track that felt more like 2001-era Dr. Dre than something Lizzo might have cooked up with Ricky Reed. If Swae’s hook there had a friendly, flirtatious air, the one on “Come Get Her” toggled effortlessly to the dark side of nightlife. In a mesmerizing minor-key sing-song, he envisions a drunk woman who needs to be rescued by her friends before the evening takes a dangerous turn: “Somebody come get her, she’s dancing like a stripper.” It’s one of those melodies that burrows itself in your brain for weeks on end.
The best parts of SremmLife have an enduring appeal, but there are plenty of instances where the album shows its age, be it the extremely mid-2010s slang at the heart of opener “Lit Like Bic” or the way you can hear the EDM era dying in real time on ill-advised closing track “Safe Sex Pay Checks.” Hyper-repetitive filler like “Unlock The Swag” and “My X” would be best left to rot in shadowy corners of SoundCloud. But nothing makes a decade ago feel more like a lifetime ago than “Up Like Trump,” the final artifact of an historical epoch when Donald Trump was nothing more than a symbol of gaudy wealth. Rae Sremmurd may have their own regrets from those years, but recording that song is not one of them; after Trump’s election in 2016, Swae gloated to The Guardian that “Up Like Trump” was “some prophet shit.”
Rae Sremmurd were always more of a singles act, and though the brothers’ biggest hits were still ahead of them — namely “Black Beatles” and an assortment of Swae Lee solo efforts, all of which highlighted his melodic intuition as the group’s special sauce — they never made another album nearly as satisfying as their debut. SremmLife was one of those unrepeatable lightning-in-a-bottle situations, a perfect convergence of circumstances. The Browns, bursting with untapped energy and ideas, aligned with Mike WiLL Made-It at the height of his imperial era and delivered rap songs that worked as pop music at a time when, after half a decade of Electric Daisy Carnival hegemony, public hunger for accessible hip-hop was on the rise. The likes of Drake, Nicki, and Future had created a massive lane for this kind of stylish, accessible rap, and Rae Sremmurd swaggered right into it with a contagious vigor. I’m not sure the album would connect the same way today, in our country-fried pop-rock zeitgeist — the underrated Sremm 4 Life came and went without fanfare in 2023 — but SremmLife was ideally suited for its moment. I should have knooooown better.
