Pusha T’s voice—snarling and crystalline, among the most distinctive in his generation—would be compelling if he were rapping on a click track. But after the Clipse, the duo he had formed with his brother Malice, disbanded, the Virginia Beach rapper’s early solo efforts were marred by production that often suffocated him. Records like 2011’s Fear of God II: Let Us Pray and 2013’s Wrath of Caine can get lost in the digital-maximalist wilderness. Though he’d navigated similar lanes nimbly in the past, Pusha was now drowned out by beats that were crowded in the most predictable, post-Lex Luger ways, some of which he even let lure him into conspicuously borrowed flows. He eventually shed this to find something meaner and radically spare; his most recent album, 2018’s seven-song, 21-minute Daytona, mirrors this minimalism in its very construction.
The other thing, aside from leanness, that “Numbers on the Board,” “Nosetalgia,” and “Untouchable” have in common with Daytona is that none of them are produced by the Neptunes. After handling the vast majority of Clipse’s studio albums, Pharrell and Chad Hugo were all but absent from Pusha’s solo work. Now Pharrell returns to produce more than half of It’s Almost Dry, Pusha’s first new record in nearly four years. It’s a musically varied and vocally impressive effort from an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting, drilling closer to the core of his style.
Clipse LPs were once conduits for the Neptunes’ most experimental rap beats; Pharrell’s work on It’s Almost Dry honors that legacy, leading Pusha into narcotized carnivals (“Call My Bluff”) and the climaxes of sci-fi thrillers (the naggingly eerie “Scrape It Off”). In fact, there’s a foreboding quality to all of the Pharrell beats here, from the opening suite of “Brambleton” and “Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,” where the former’s electronic bounce and latter’s freneticism make each other seem more sinister.
The rest of It’s Almost Dry is helmed by Kanye West, along with a few co-producers, most notably the New York veteran 88-Keys on lead single “Diet Coke.” Kanye’s beats are not as uniformly excellent as Pharrell’s: Closer “I Pray for You” is dragged down by pedestrian drums, and “Diet Coke” plays like paint-by-numbers Pusha. (The latter song is perhaps a victim of the hyper-clear mixes the rapper prefers; it sounds like a slightly sterile version of the grimier songs it attempts to evoke.) But the best Kanye is enrapturing. On first listen, the slight, Colonel Bagshot-sampling “Just So You Remember” reminded me of the Daytona finale “Infrared.” It’s actually closer to being a Ka song, so quiet that it’s barely there. “Dreamin’ of the Past,” which is built around Donny Hathaway’s recording of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” is the sort of song Kanye produced around the turn of the century: maddening at first for the obviousness of its sample flip, and then for its effectiveness. “Hear Me Clearly” sounds like the tail end of a nuclear winter.