Coin Locker Kid caught our attention last year as a featured artist on Geoff Barrow's Quakers hip-hop collective project on Stones Throw. He contributed to 3 essential tracks off that album, directed the video for “Russia With Love” and displayed an impressively weird and menacing lyrical aptitude throughout. While no one would tag any of those songs as traditional hip-hop, the tracks Devyn Smith compiled for his dark and experimental debut, The Ghost Sonata, puts tradition on its ass altogether. It presents a fascinating landscape of abrasive sounds, beats and audio bytes, leaving an often haunting impression of isolation.
On “Gretle”, CLK rambles over nothing more than the thuds of conga drums, with bursts of tribal sounding vocals and eerie high-note strikes of an old piano. Everything about it is subtle except for how sinister but totally enticed it feels. This Brit is operating on another level even if we're not quite sure what it is.
Listen to The Ghost Sonata in full at Coin Locker Kid's Bandcamp.
