Wandering around a massive Baptist church in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Fly Anakin wonders if it would be messed up to roll a joint. On one hand, he figures, if the tiny upside-down cross tattooed under his left eye didn’t get him struck down by the Lord as soon as he walked through the doors, then a little weed won’t hurt. Then again, the 27-year-old was once an avid churchgoer while growing up in Richmond, Virginia—though he’s quick to mention that he was forced into it by his mom (who only went to please his grandmother). As a teenager, a couple of acid trips led to the realization that organized religion wasn’t for him. But he still looks uncomfortable as he sprinkles weed into the papers on top of a keyboard in the church’s music room. In the end, wary of testing a higher power, he ventures into the winter chill to smoke.
Back inside, Anakin’s footsteps echo like crash cymbals in the empty hallway. He’s at the church to shoot a scene with frequent collaborator Pink Siifu for “Black Be the Source,” a meditative track on Anakin’s proper debut album Frank, which follows years of underground mixtapes. Anakin is in town from Atlanta, where he lives with his girlfriend, the rapper bbymutha. He changes out of his sweats and into a gray suit and a pair of shoes he dubs “the Obamas” for the video, which digs into the complexities of everyday Black life. He doesn’t look happy to be dressed up, though, and says the only reason he owns the outfit is because an ex’s dad once told him “every man needs a good suit” and took him to get fitted.
To retain a touch of his laid-back personality while in the stuffy ensemble, Anakin keeps his durag on as he enters the nave. Surrounded by stained-glass windows, Siifu acts as the pastor preaching his verse to Anakin as the cameras roll. “Black Be the Source” has a smoky feel to it, with Anakin’s brisk delivery sinking into a crackling beat. In between takes, Anakin and Siifu, who put out two joint projects over the last couple of years, crack jokes about the fact that they’ve been given free reign in this place of worship. Later on, Anakin emphasizes that they aren’t friends because they make music together, they make music together because they’re friends. At the shoot, the pair bounce ideas off each other about how to make Frank the breakout moment Anakin wants it to be.
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Mostly recorded in 2019, Frank has been sitting on Fly Anakin’s hard drive throughout the entire pandemic. He put it on the shelf because he wanted to tour behind the record and give this personal project (he was born Frank Walton) the best opportunity to shine. “In underground rap we’re basically freelancers—if it’s a slow month, the government crash, I’m not on tour, not selling merch, I got to figure some shit out,” he says. “I’m not trying to work for nobody. The last job I had was in 2019, and I’m not trying to go back.” The album was recorded while he was still punching in at an old folks home in Richmond. He hated the gig and would often sweet-talk his co-workers into doing his tasks while he took smoke breaks. “Those struggles make for great songs,” he says, able to laugh at his old life now that he’s not living it.
The idea of releasing an album with a plan in mind is new to him: Since his early days as a member of the Richmond-based collective Mutant Academy, a group of rappers and producers who specialize in East Coast classicist raps and sample-based loops, Anakin has been extremely prolific. Over the last half decade, Anakin and his crew have developed a whole world of mixtapes, EPs, and collaborative projects spread across multiple Bandcamp channels. “I used to give myself 30 days to make a project and, if it was good, just put that shit out,” he says. “That’s how I got my chops up. But Frank needed to be respected.”
Despite what the title may suggest, Frank doesn’t tell his story through the usual autobiographical lens but rather through paying homage to his hometown. Even though he’s left Richmond for Atlanta, his relationship with the city remains both tight and complicated, like that of many Black urbanites. A lot of people he used to know there have reached dead ends or moved away, and he’s at once nostalgic for his youthful days and glad they’ve passed him by. “All my trials and tribulations and trauma are in Richmond,” he says. “Ain’t nothing there for me, but it’ll always be the crib.”
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The album is a community affair, made to capture the feeling of the early days of Mutant Academy, when countless hours were spent joking, playing video games, and making music when it felt right. Peppered with off-the-cuff skits, the album feels like eavesdropping on a group of friends having stoned conversations with each other. “My friends are fucking hilarious, bro,” he says of those in-between moments.
Anakin talks about his music casually—“It ain’t really that deep for me, I ain’t doing nothing but talking about my life and what’s happening in the moment”—but it’s not that simple. The raps are skillful, filled with multisyllabic rhyme schemes that are as mesmerizing as a perfectly executed crossover, while the lived-in production comes courtesy of beatmakers within Mutant Academy’s orbit along with underground luminaries including Madlib and Evidence.
But the album shows off more than textbook skills. There are vignettes vivid enough to focus the mind’s eye, like when Anakin raps, “Niggas will shoot you with yo own gun, that shit ain’t no fun/And then watch the shit on the news, I used to know some” on the Foisey-produced “Class Clown.” There’s the way he raps under the mix on “Love Song (Come Back)” until he cranks out some woozy, Max B-influenced croons. And there are a lot of lines that feel like they were made to be rapped along with in an intimate venue filled with fans who collect Mutant Academy tapes like baseball cards: “My shorty body posi, that’s why she naked all the time talking ’bout, ‘Don’t watch me,’” he raps through his nasally delivery on “Sean Price.”
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As our interview goes on, it becomes clear that he’s most excited to talk about the songs on the record with his friends, which often double as album highlights. Whether it’s “Telepathic,” where it sounds like Anakin and Big Kahuna OG are passing the joint back and forth as they freestyle on the porch, or the way Anakin and Henny L.O. attack a fuzzy Sycho Sid beat on “Dontbeafraid,” the sense of kinship runs deep. These days Mutant Academy is spread throughout the country, and they have to go out of their way to set aside time together and try to recreate the magic they once felt back in Richmond. “I can go to L.A., or they can come to Atlanta, but it’s not the crib,” Anakin says. “I wanted to make sure my album felt like home.”
