Datkid "Virus" [VIDEO]

The first thing to get straight: Very Heavy Lead isn't out yet. The album is scheduled for late November on High Focus Records, Datkid's first full-length for the label in five years. "Virus" is track sixteen, out now as a single with a video shot by Illinformed and Jenna-Louise Crooknorth. The production is the story

Illinformed and Dumb Logic produced the whole album together not splitting tracks between them but working the same rooms, playing instruments, building each record jointly. That's an unusual method for a UK boom-bap LP and it's audible. "Virus" has the weight of a live take: the drums sit slightly behind where a sampled break would land, the bassline moves, and the whole thing breathes in a way that loop-based production generally doesn't. It's a darker, dirtier sound than a straight crate-dig record, and it suits Datkid. The verse, and the joke He spends the track as the contamination. "I got the poison. Don't let me get into your head," then: "we rain down very heavy lead" the album title doing double duty as a pun the record earns rather than announces. The writing is Datkid at his most Bristolian: absurd, specific, and funnier than it first sounds. "Catch me rapping like a Christmas elf and sleeping like a crack user." "I peel your pride back like a satsuma." "Nice things, I spoil them." The flow is loose to the point of sprawl, and he never raises his voice; the menace is entirely in the imagery. The outro is the trick: a sampled voice discussing lead poisoning as an occupational hazard nausea, nerve damage, hallucinations as a clinical diagnosis of the rapper we've just heard. It's a smart, dry way to close a record called "Virus." Where it sits

Eighteen tracks, and the features are a who's who of the UK underground rather than a guest list: Jack Jetson, Bil Next, Leaf Dog, Eric The Red, Smellington Piff, BVA, Sean Peng, Jman, Crossbow T, and Young Zee the Fugees and Eminem collaborator on "Fresh Out." Two posse cuts close it out. Five years since WAKMO is a long time in a scene this fast. If the rest of the album holds the standard of its sixteenth track, the wait will look justified.

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