Moving too fast at the start of an ambitious career can have a lot of pitfalls, and to some extent, the same can be said for taking your time. Finding the right balance of urgency and good timing is a lot harder than it sounds on paper, but if Vikki Sota is daunted by the task in any capacity, you’d never know it just from listening to his music. Sota presents himself as a very cool, calm, collected individual in all of the music he’s recorded thus far, and it’s led to a lot of critical anticipation ahead of his new EP, Genesis, debuting.
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He’s already racked up some points with listeners through a pair of singles – “Run up my Bands” and the more cerebral “Swimming” – and it’s through the success of these two songs that he’s already secured an audience a lot of his peers can’t obtain before dropping a proper LP. This isn’t a rapper resting on his laurels though; Genesis is another level in his growing empire of artistic expression, and there’s a good chance it’s going to be one of the more important extended plays to arrive out of his scene all season long.
There’s one heck of a strong demand for surreal beats in hip-hop and alternative rock right now, but I’m not getting the impression from anything Vikki Sota has given us so far that he’s particularly hung up on trying to satisfy a mainstream desire just yet. The postmodernity of his music is incidental more than it’s intentional, and I think that, were he to drop some of the trap-style accents from his rhythm, he would probably sound a bit more psychedelic and experimental than he has in tracks like the excellently smooth “Run up my Bands.”
He’s never rushing through his verses but allowing their moodiness to take over the narrative just as a slick bassline can. I don’t see his meticulousness in the studio doing him anything but favors in this era of hip-hop, and when put up side by side with some of the more overthought pop efforts certain critics would call meticulous, this is by far the more superior option to suit your listening needs.
I suppose there’s a time and place for excess and theatrics in popular music, but when it comes to the quality work Vikki Sota is making at the moment, indulgence is just not part of the formula for success. He’s got a similar profile to a lot of other upstarts in the rap game trying to distinguish themselves from an out of touch old guard that wants to cling to the funky beats of the past (no matter what), but with one key difference – he’s more aggressive with what he’s trying to tell the audience. Sota is already an elite and he hasn’t even dropped his new EP yet, so at the rate he’s moving right now I would have to assume his 2022 is going to be a breakthrough year and then some.
Levi Colston