I blinked too fast, and all of a sudden, it was time to do retrospectives on the music of Young Thug. After briefly confronting my own mortality—Barter 6 and “2 B’s (Danny Glover)” are how old?—it’s staggering to consider just how large the YSL head honcho’s musical and cultural footprints are. Heads were using terms like “post-text” to describe the way his voice landed on people’s eardrums back in 2016, and there isn’t another rapper alive whose excitable flows and vocal tics could be credited with both reshaping Atlanta rap and inspiring Elton John. Even at what’s arguably the nadir of his popularity post-RICO trial, Thug is currently shepherding his second cohort of young Atlanta upstarts like Tezzus, diamond*, and Pz’ into the spotlight.
skaiwater isn’t part of that clique and wasn’t even born on this side of the globe, but their frenetic, lovelorn chortles and rap-first genre-hopping mark them as a child of Thug regardless. Their breakout album, 2024’s #gigi, best showcases the ambition of an artist blending rage rap, Jersey club, and emo rock with the excitement of a kid trying to mix all the Fun Dips into one flavor. That ambition also caused wonderful, their attempt at making a Capital-A Album, to collapse under its own weight. Now they’re back with femme fatale, a leaner, Thug-inspired—lead single “HITUNES” is named after Thug’s shelved debut—bout of Pan-Africanist musical fusion.
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From the start, skaiwater’s aesthetic relied on shocking musical contrasts. Rage distortion layered over shimmering bells and synths? Swag-era 808s chased with blasts of scrambled pop and a confetti canon? skai had you covered and, most likely, stunned. That novelty’s worn off a bit over the past two years, but femme fatale represents both a recalibration and an expansion. Genre-smashing collabs still abound—opener “vampires, zombies” finds room for twee choral vocals, guitar shredding, and DS2-era siren tags—but on femme fatale the Caribbean riddims and Afrobeats grooves, mere flirtations before, are foregrounded more than ever.
“ella” and “radar, radar” skew closest, but about a quarter of the tracklist works that patented sway in somewhere. On “ella,” faint horn lines meld with the bouncing 808s for a vibe that’s mild without losing the punch and groove you’d expect from an Afrohouse and dembow mashup. Most refreshing are some of the calmest songs in skaiwater’s discography: The muted shuffle of “foreigner,” produced by skai and MadeByIncomplete, is minimal compared to the crunchy thump typical of the average skaiwater experience, as are the fast-paced club claps of “sophia.” They never sound like stabs at playlist placement or experiments for experiment’s sake, but nuances and tweaks that don’t mistake mass appeal for lowest common denominator.
Lyrically, skai is still the same hopeless romantic and designer-rack demon they’ve always been. Half the fun of their music is how, like Thug, they’re free to go ballistic with the ad-libs and vocalization over the showier musical arrangements. There’s nothing particularly special about how they tell a partner to ignore the price tags at Sephora and go spend-crazy on “HITUNES” (“Don’t fuck my high up!”), or the way they turn phrases into mini-hooks with Carti-like persistence: intense sex, intense drugs, intense flaunts of Rick Owens boots. All this is window dressing to amplify the beat-centric wanderlust pulling skai to different musical corners. The handful of plinky rage-adjacent songs here, like “HITUNES,” “WEVERSE,” and closer “JUMP,” sink in more when they lock into this mode. By establishing a clearer binary between the turnt tracks and the more sedate grooves, skai shows how impactful they all can be on their own.
femme fatale succeeds where wonderful stumbled because its streamlining of skaiwater’s vibe doesn’t sand away the edges. Even the biggest swings on this album don’t quite match the splendor of #gigi’s “play,” “box,” or “rain,” but femme fatale’s best moments are breezy and heartfelt. When big cosigns start coming in, there’s always pressure to either conform to what’s popping or make a hard left to fulfill an artistic vision. With femme fatale, they’re closer than ever to finding a happy medium.
