Look at Wrist

Father's "Look at Wrist" operates on a deadpan so committed it becomes its own form of comedy — his delivery so deliberately flat and unhurried that the braggadocio lands sideways, slightly absurdist, self-aware enough to wink at the entire tradition of flexing it's participating in. The production is minimal Atlanta trap — the hi-hats roll with mechanical persistence, the 808s hit with appropriate weight, but nothing here is trying to overwhelm you. Father's voice is conversational to an almost aggressive degree, refusing the heightened register that most trap adopts, which creates a fascinating tension between the genre's conventions and his studied refusal of them. He sounds like someone narrating mundane observations to a friend rather than commanding attention from a crowd. The lyrical content circles around possessions and status but treats them with such casual affect that mockery and sincerity become genuinely interchangeable — you're never entirely certain whether he believes himself or is laughing at himself, and that instability is the joke. This belongs to the 2013-2015 wave of Awful Records output that proposed an alternative Atlanta sound, one that absorbed trap's skeleton but filled it with something stranger and more irreverent. It's perfect music for driving around going nowhere in particular, for the specific bored confidence of a Saturday when nothing is pressing and you find everything slightly funny.