Ben Hedibi & uMaNg "Help Less" [VIDEO]

Toronto producer Ben Hedibi and Salt Lake City emcee uMaNg have a collaborative album called Stray Dogs arriving at the end of the month eighteen tracks, their first full-length together and "Help Less" is the first single and video off it. The title does the work before the verse does. uMaNg spends the record on the mechanics of being judged by people who aren't making anything: "They don't rap, they just review / Tell 'em: help less." Then the darker turn "Tired of my own thoughts, so I dug my own grave / Poured dirt on my dreams and I blamed the whole game." Hedibi's production underneath is soul-based and slightly unsettled, the kind of loop that keeps shifting weight so the verse never quite settles into it. The second verse sharpens. "Snakes on the path, but the grass stays cut" is the best line on the record, and the closing movement flips the pitbull idiom the whole album is arguing with: rappers doing a poor dog impression, "I'm a nightmare livin' in your dream." It's a genuinely uncomfortable closing image and it lands. What's promising here is the pairing. Hedibi works in the haunted-boom-bap register that Canadian producers have been quietly excellent at for a decade, and uMaNg writes dense and imagistic without losing the thread multi-syllabic, horror-adjacent, but anchored to a subject. Two veterans, no label machinery, and an album that's been built across a national border.

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