Spaceman and Fatboi Sharif come through like a solar flare, unanticipated, disorienting, and never to be forgotten in a genre fully invested in faux hooks and disposable vibes. Their latest, "Think Twice," is a thick, abstruse transmission from the outlands of hip-hop's creative galaxy, and it is anything but mundane. Produced by the enigmatic The Suspect (Allegedly), the track slinks in like a fog. With vaporwave allusions, creepy synth rattles that call to mind an eerie underbelly of a John Carpenter score, and a raw, left-field boom-bap rhythm, "Think Twice" is what it might feel like to stroll into a haunted arcade on Mars. And it is that odd and that successful.
Spaceman sets the bar with his "rugged bugged rhymes," a phrase that hardly does justice to his off-the-hook cadence and vocabulary gymnastics. Speaking in deliberate tones, he sounds like he's decoding transmissions from the furthest galaxies for an earthbound listener, sometimes cryptic, sometimes cutting, always captivating. Deciding to live up to his rep as a lyrical wild card, Fatboi Sharif comes in with a verse that doesn't want to be categorized. It crawls through the track, haunting it and giving "Think Twice" its heavy middle punch. The single is a big moment for Spaceman's "Social Skills" series, a cluster of collaborations representing a change in the emcee's artistic direction. Renowned for his lonely, grueling hoist, his last three projects were all solos, and "Think Twice" finds him sharing a space and keening together in creative communion.
Their connection dates to the underground radio shows of the early 2010s, when Sharif backed Spaceman's previous crew before he was even on the microphone. That history infuses the song with life, granting it a lived-in, slightly ghostly feel of kindred veterans speaking in code that only they will fully understand. "Think Twice" is the sort of record you know from one of those moments when you stumbled on, even if it is a rap record or the portal to something greater. Either way, with this new drop, Spaceman and Fatboi Sharif are already one step ahead.
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