As short and sweet as the brief introduction to DaŹaY’s “Quarantine” is, it’s undeniably supporting the right sort of ominousness to get the ball rolling in a song like this one. There’s something really rich about the instrumental disarray that we find the first couple of bars in this track trapped within, and though it’s only for a few fleeting moments, it supplies us with enough knowledge about DaŹaY’s ambient pop influences to assume there are going to be plenty of alternative trappings in this piece. “Quarantine” is insular and smothering, but in the best way a track and its video can be either of these things.

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The music video for the song plays out a little simpler than the track does by itself, but only because the imagery gives us a bit of context and breaks up the nauseating effect of the heavy bassline in the backdrop perfectly. It could have been spruced up to exploit the cerebral element within its look just a bit more than it was, but I can see where DaŹaY would see such an idea as being too much given the serious indie aesthetic of the other components of the song, compositional and otherwise.

Though I don’t think the percussion steals any of the main spotlight away from my man when the verses are coming at us like sharpened daggers in the midsection of the song, I will say it sets up a beat that I still cannot get out of my head over a week after hearing it the first time. Swagger is what makes or breaks your sound and style of play in this kind of music, and it’s through more surreal angles like this one that we understand how well DaŹaY can utilize his own confidence when it comes to delivering the goods.

“Quarantine” is hardly the only single of its kind covering the subject of last year’s inconvenient pandemic and the aftereffects it’s had on everything from culture to interpersonal relationships, but it’s definitely one of the best in the rap game to have come to my attention lately. DaŹaY owns the stage and reminds us that the biggest guns in hip-hop don’t come bankrolled with a lot of crass commercial concepts to boot; they’re steeped in the underground traditions – and left-field experimentations – that once made the east and west coasts competitive to the point of inciting near-civil war.

John McCall