Continuing in the vein of his previous projects, TH uses his debut album to refine his aesthetic, disillusioned rap that remains as unique as ever in France.
One can tell oneself that the world is profoundly beautiful, that it holds a discreet poetry and that this poetry is offered only to those who take the time to look a little beyond the surface. One can also tell oneself, and this is equally true, that it is full of violence and that this brutality hits so hard that there are no other options than to view life askew, through the eyes of those who have taken too many blows and who, since then, swear only by the facts. E-Music is exactly that: a puzzle of words and thoughts within which the rapper from the 93 enumerates a slew of observations, lays out an idea and then moves on to the next, concerned with deciphering what shapes social relations and individual aspirations.
There is no morality or hierarchy here, simply contrasted reflections and a reality that TH, like Alpha 5.20 or Stavo before him, dissects without filters, in lines balanced like so many definitive truths: “In the reports, there’s never a slip‑up” ; “Fuck the retirement home, my retirement, I’ll make it in a brothel” ; “I don’t have the right to sell coke, but the country sells weapons” ; “When you arrive in my city, it stinks of drugs” ; “You don’t buy a gamos with a teacher’s salary”, etc.
From e-trap to electrap
It’s sometimes too much, obviously, but that harshness, these tracks sometimes built like single verses, this clarity of purpose, you cannot pretend it doesn’t exist, as if this were not the signature gesture of an artist who, in a handful of EPs and mixtapes, has built a universe unlike any other.
“E-trap” first, then “electrap” or now “e-music,” perhaps, in the sense of freeing himself from a dogma he created himself. Or at least, leaning toward a more open music, filled with hypnotic loops, economical rhythms and hazy synths, sometimes drawn from emo or digicore, where the aim is less to accompany TH’s flow than to magnify its sparks, to reinforce each of his lines, sometimes screamed, sometimes casually tossed off.
Up Close to Reality
Rhyme and metrical structure, who cares about them? What matters here is this stubborn melancholy and this deep, charismatic voice, the kind that narrates a macabre life without a pose: that of a nihilist, a sad criminal in the vein of Neil McCauley in Heat. Also that of a man stuck in The Forest of Buildings – the title of one of the album’s most powerful tracks – who hides nothing of his dark thoughts and who, without seeming to, manages to capture here the mutations of the modern world, with all that implies in terms of irony, existential anxieties and unattainable dreams: “One day I’ll go to the moon to shine beside it.”.
E-Music (Noviceland/Because). Release on April 3.
“E-Music” by TH: A Nihilistic Debut Album
