Shooqa 22 arrives on the scene with a debut that doesn’t like coloring inside the lines. Their debut single, “Isgonnabeok (drill-jazz #2),” isn’t so much a song as a mood piece that shape-shifts as it progresses. Part drill, part jazz, part heartbreak anthem, the song is a genre-defying debut, murmuring reassurance even as it pulses with unrest.
“Isgonnabeok (drill-jazz #2)” gets under your skin quickly. The verse comes in sad, spacious, brutal. There’s a composure to how Shooqa 22 delivers his almost light words, as though it required effort to hold back welling tears. Yet before the melancholy can settle, the chorus takes off like a flare in the night that is bold, fiercely anthemic, and weirdly popster, as if hope got its hands on a mic and gave as good as it got.
And then comes the twist. The track is sliced in half by a jazz saxophone solo that snakes its way through the drill rhythm like the ghost in the machine. It’s not a trick, it’s a revelation. When we encounter genre mash-ups, they often feel like several DJs have cued up a party trick. Here, it feels lived in, necessary. It’s here, on Shooqa 22, and establish that they’re not just fucking around for effect. They’re constructing their own thing entirely.
“Isgonnabeok (drill-jazz #2)” doesn’t simply tell you it’ll be all right. It makes you believe that for a few minutes, anyway. It’s raw but not brittle, jangled but not disorderly. The song leaves you stranded in the awkward, taut gap between despair and defiance, and that’s where its power lies.