It’s easy to dismiss a rap crew’s next-in-line as a second-rate sidekick. Benny the Butcher sought to establish himself on Griselda Records around the time his cousins—company founder Westside Gunn and Conway The Machine—were hitting new peaks in their ascent. Benny, too, had spent years battling his way through the East Coast rap metro, like a hip-hop Doomguy. While Gunn and Conway recast Buffalo, New York as a gangster rap principality, optics made it seem like they were bringing a fortunate family member into the fold. But here’s the thing: Benny’s 2018 album Tana Talk 3 was a bit of a genre classic, a brutal piece of rap-noir drama over The Alchemist and Daringer’s concrete-hard beats. The message came through in 400 gigapixels: Benny was nobody’s background subordinate.
Benny has proven himself a man apart by diversifying Griselda’s sonic philosophy. The group has attracted 1,000 Wu-Tang comparisons, which aren’t inaccurate but ignore that Griselda’s grimy boom-bap comes with its own glittering flourishes and high art proclivities. Benny’s music feels less painstakingly crafted than Westside Gunn’s. Instead, he brings the blunt urgency of Kool G Rap, rich storytelling that draws from years of selling heroin, and a taste for beats inspired by the early-to-mid-2000s work of producers like the Heatmakerz and Just Blaze. Recorded in a single day back in 2019, Pyrex Picasso is part of a rush of excellent recent releases from Benny. At just seven tracks and less than 20 minutes in length, the record is skinny, the kind of seemingly inconsequential release that Griselda artists regularly drop between major projects (see Gunn’s Hitler Wears Hermes series). But it accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of Benny’s recent purple patch—an era that will be remembered as golden for The Butcher.
The specter of Dipset is palpable. “Flood the Block” features familiar slapped guitars, dramatic samples, and a reduced focus on bass, with Benny’s deliberate approach even shadowing Cam’ron’s flow. Some may lament that there’s nothing as dark and spectral as, say, “3.30 In Houston,” but for those who miss buying XXL at the bodega stand, Pyrex Picasso will satisfy their cravings. The era-specific production, handled entirely by Chop-La-Rock and Rare Scrilla, is matched with pockets of nostalgia throughout the album. But there’s no Nas-style back-in-the-day sentimentality: “PWRDRL” sees Benny reminiscing about his life when “the Towers fell,” detailing drug trafficking from Houston to Baton Rouge, and declaring, “I’m an old school n***a, my morals come from the past.”