Black Milk Drops "Everybody Good?."
Detroit rapper-producer Black Milk floats into his eighth studio album, Everybody Good?, on a bed of the lushest synthetic funk this side of Thundercat. Intro “God Willing” sets a frenetic bassline against strata of electronic keys, soft background vocals, and drums hard enough to knock a filling loose. It’s a stone-cold groove with a hip-hop twist that compresses 60 years of Black music into a sound equally fit for a sweaty dancefloor as head nods in AirPods. Following in the footsteps of multihyphenates like Q-Tip and the late J Dilla, Milk has spent the years since 2018’s FEVER closing the already small gaps between rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech while honing an anxious, socially conscious writing style. On Everybody Good? he sounds more comfortable than ever as both a bandleader and an astute everyman.
He remains a producer first and foremost. The music of Everybody Good? was produced, arranged, and mixed pre-COVID, and the beats, as ever, are gorgeous and meticulously crafted. Splitting the difference between traditional and live-band hip-hop, Milk often samples session players and then chops up the recordings the old-fashioned way.
What separates him from fellow era-blending contemporaries like Oddisee is his love for the rakish, crooked bliss of Dilla time. Drums pop seconds before and after you expect; the low end is turned up in the mix, looming over the arrangements of “Wait Til Fate” and “Downs Got Up.” The lead single, “Is It Just Me?” gives the vintage Black Milk sound a stickier feel with a beehive of synths, bass, and keyboards whirring around stilted drum claps.
Nast, C. (n.d.). Black Milk: Everybody Good? Pitchfork. Retrieved July 19, 2023, from https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-milk-everybody-good/
