Watch Over My Body

Some music isn’t meant to be heard with anyone else. You don’t listen to Aethiopes or Turn on the Bright Lights and think, “Damn, maybe I should play this the next time I have friends over.” These are records you wallow in alone. In 2023, one of my most played songs of the year was Xang’s “for me,” a spacy, desolate track that wrapped itself around me on streetlit walks home. Across two minutes, the Maryland rapper’s breathy, overlapping vocals seep into a spine-tingling haze of keys and muffled bass, casting a chill of unease. Xang’s lyrics are often incoherent, which can be a drawback, but it’s his ability to build an atmosphere unique to him that continues to lure me in; his sludgy drawl unravels on horror OSTs like dark bolts of silk. The 24-year-old artist is an anchor of the scattershot rap clique DPM, an online collective that repurposes ’90s ambient (and whatever else they get their hands on) into skin-crawling tracks with tactile percussion. His textures are equal parts alien and familiar: The Frankenstein’d Drake and Wayne beats he floats over are fitted with awkwardly placed snares and kicks that somehow maintain engrossing rhythms. The producers in Xang’s orbit—ivvys, theo, .cutspace, westly, and countless others—set the tone for a ghastly ambiance that’s amplified by his gruff, brooding delivery.

Watch Over My Body, or WOMB, is the clearest distillation of Xang’s vision since his emergence in 2021. Nestled beneath his uncanny struggle rap are signifiers of his home soil: the tinny bells on “notice,” the blistering kick drums on “hangman,” the distinctive DMV punch-ins on “by myself.” “cake got baked” has this mischievous, cascading progression that sounds like something Goonew and Lil Dude would’ve slid on in 2017. But even with this in mind, WOMB features some of the most off-kilter hip-hop you’ll hear this year; in a recent interview with The Fader, Xang simply dubbed it “headphone music.” The mechanical lurch of “paid” fits that label. As wailing livestock and warbling ad-libs pan from left to right, the mood is pensive and restless, almost nauseating. Like a little cousin to billy woods’ “The Doldrums,” “paid”’s use of acrid sound design in empty space is too surreal to turn away from. It sounds like what a midnight drive through a sundown town must feel like. Xang definitely isn’t the promethean writer that woods is, but the existential gloom in his voice is all the same. “Bitch wanna eat, gon’ sell that box/It is what it is,” he mutters. “Bro wanna eat, but he stuck in a box/It is what it is.”

As cold and insular as his sound is, Xang still leaves room for levity. “forehead up” is as brisk as it is spooky, and the cheery violin flourishes from Twista’s “Overnight Celebrity” turn “hangman” into a bright spot. Sometimes Xang’s creepy backing melodies remind me of being a kid singing into an electric fan. Other times his marble-mouthed delivery steamrolls over funny (albeit bleak) asides. “Cuh got hit in his head/Fuck I look like fighting?” he goads on “cake got baked.” When he has more drugs than he knows what to do with, he pictures his opps in disbelief: “How the hell lil Xang keep scorin’ them scripts?/He trippin’.” WOMB is a concise record, just 20 minutes long, but its layers of muck and grime make additional listens feel like coal mining—here’s a searing snare roll in one corner, a punchy one-liner in another. On “bruce wayne,” Xang cuts through smog with a scythe: the pitched-down moans, quaking bass, and spurts of processed strings all form one heavy mist. Each repetition feels denser than the last.

Xang’s ability to cultivate chilling atmosphere has as much to do with his voice as his production choices; he burrows into the mix and lets his punch-ins bleed into each other, rapping like his teeth are clenched tight. It works on “by myself” and “bruce wayne,” where he appears like an undead spirit who’ll jugg you for everything in your pockets. The catch is how hard it can be to hear what he’s getting across—on “ricky rubio,” his delivery is so vaporous it’s nearly impossible to decipher. When Xang disappears in the fog of the production, he starts to lose his appeal; the more precise and forthright he is with his vocals, like on “cake got baked,” the better. Without abandoning the mise-en-scène, I wanna hear him emphasize what he’s really saying.

Regardless, if Watch Over My Body serves as a breakthrough for DPM’s avant-garde rap portraiture, the genre will be better for it. “notice” closes the tape with that Cortex sample you’ve probably heard before, but producer balenci02’s rumbling 808s, doomsday bells, and elliptical synths give Xang room to make it his own. A standard often flipped with bong rips and kickbacks in mind feels newly calamitous, and Xang replaces the tight-lipped malaise with hardnosed zeal. He’s possessed and invigorated, rapping like he’s barreling down the highway in a 16-wheeler: The windows are down, the engine purrs, and it’s hard to make out his words as the wind whips past, but you could get drunk off the adrenaline.