Tierra Whack can really, really rap. The Philadelphia artist is a super-inventive visual stylist with a ton of bright art-pop ideas, so it can be easy to overlook the fact that she’s got bars. It’ll be a lot harder once you hear her new record Whack’s Museum. When she announced the impending release a couple of weeks ago, Whack referred to Whack’s Museum as a “rap mixtape.” She wasn’t kidding.
Tierra Whack changed the game with her 15-minute visual album Whack’s World back in 2018, and she sought to refine its explosive expressionism on her 2024 major label debut World Wide Whack. On Whack’s Museum, Whack does something very different. She teased the mixtape release by putting on a boom-bap clinic with the Conductor Williams-produced single “Wax Paper,” and that’s basically what she does through the whole tape.
Conductor Williams produced a bunch of the tracks on Whack’s Museum, and those beats give Whack a chance to really bar out. On opening song “Whack Job,” the beat keeps slowing down and speeding up like warped vinyl, and Whack keeps pace with it, never getting thrown off. All the tracks are built on the classic East Coast neck-snap sound. Whack doesn’t just adapt to that approach. She thrives in it, as if it’s all she ever knew. She gets a little melodic sometimes, but she never stops rapping. I’m on my first listen, but I’m extremely impressed. Stream it below.
Whack’s Museum is out now on Interscope.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
