If you have been following underground hip-hop in recent years, there’s a good chance you already heard some of what Feez da Popstar was cooking up in the studio. Culminating with the breakout singles “All I Need Is” and “Hard Candy,” the much-buzzed rapper and songwriter has come on strong with a lot of critics curious about what he had in store for 2024; and, without skipping a beat, he’s back this June with a new single in “M T F (More Than Friends)” that is everything its title would suggest it could be. The solid vibes are along for the ride once more in this latest cut, and the chemistry in the studio is hard to ignore.
In the time that has gone by since Feez da Popstar dropped “It’s the Summer,” the first song I heard to bear his name in the byline, I think he’s gotten a lot more focused on his linguistics, especially in how he structures a narrative. While he’s more melodic in this track than he’s ever been before, he also sounds a lot more poetic in his delivery, developing contrast without losing any continuity in his verses. He’s come a long way, and a lot of his peers could stand to take a page out of his book, aesthetically speaking.
This groove is admittedly rather inelegant, but it needs to be. Let’s be honest here – Feez da Popstar’s vocal is too classy to lean on an even rhythm and sound as powerful as it should, and by going with a grittier tempo in this performance, he’s able to spotlight both his diction and the decadence of his natural voice.
He’s leaving the meaningless extras on the sidelines and instead pulverizing us with the muscularity of a melody, which takes a lot more courage than most of the rappers in his league can muster.
The hook in “M T F (More Than Friends)” doesn’t blush the way the harmonies do, but this is largely thanks to the synthetic faceting beneath the bassline. There’s a place for synth melodicism in hip-hop, and from my perspective, it’s in a neo-balladic offering like this one. Feez da Popstar isn’t outright hitting the melody, but he might as well be; the warmth of the instrumentation makes his every word all the harder for us to resist, which in itself is a talent that plenty of players would spend the entirety of their careers either trying to cultivate or possess in some other capacity with little or no luck at all.
Feez da Popstar is coming into his big right now, and though he might not have been trying to shame the competition, he does as much when he steps up to the microphone in “M T F (More Than Friends).” The beat does its part to make this a gem of a single, but at the end of the day, it’s going to be the main man himself getting the credit for its success, as everything from the arrangement to the production style is centered on giving us a prime preview of his ambitions.
Levi Colston