For Chad Rico, rap isn’t just about adrenaline; if anything, the nimble prowess of his contemporaries frequently blends due to a lack of strong melodicism at the foundation of a composition, but that isn’t an issue in his new single and music video “New Level.” Slow-rolling and heavy because of its lead vocal (and not some synthetic bassline on the backend), “New Level” is a big, brutish piece of hip-hop that asks for us to take a step into the menacing grooves of a post-trap style of songwriting, and for me, it’s one of the better tracks of its kind out right now.

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Rico’s approach to the rhythm in this piece is definitely an understated one, but it really works brilliantly in creating a fierce mood right from the get-go. There’s no room in this mix for anything external, and he rightly leaves anything that would have crowded the beat out entirely. There isn’t a lot of urgency in the verses, but I don’t know that there needed to be for us to feel the insistence of the narrative. This song is more about inducing hypnotic effects than it is amplifying swagger, which is yet another element that separates its content from that of a mainstream player’s output this winter.

The music video for “New Level” demonstrates a remarkable amount of conceptualism on the part of its creators and stars with just a touch of ironic humor previously thought to date new material to an old school era in hip-hop. Indeed, it has been quite a while since I came across a rapper that wasn’t afraid to show a little bit of humility in addition to an affinity for the genre’s core aesthetics, and in this sense this video is probably one of the best to come out in the last year.

I really like that the percussion gets overwhelmed by the bassline on a couple of different occasions in this performance, and I wouldn’t have made any adjustments on the levels to correct this. There’s simply too chilling a vibe that comes with the vocal running straight into the brick wall on the backend here, leaving behind a shadowing void where the smooth verses once were, for anything to be changed about the current structure. This is an artist who thinks out the details before he puts pen to paper, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve taken interest in following his story recently.

Confident and sonically sophisticated to the extent of making me really intrigued by his overall discography in general, Chad Rico’s “New Level” is a great look inside of his present development as a rapper, songwriter and producer. I’d be really curious to know if this was a standalone composition or perhaps conceived in the company of other poems, beats or even just concepts Rico had been toying with ahead of getting back into the studio recently. There’s definitely a fluidity in this track that isn’t often born of rehearsal alone, and I hope I have the chance to hear it again soon.

John McCall