The Los Angeles rapper’s debut charts his development as he settles into a style that’s funny, winkingly formal, and rich in commercial potential.
When Remble started uploading music three years ago, he was exactly in tune with the scene that was codifying around him. Then a teenager, the San Pedro native rapped with a flat affect in cadences that careened past the ends of bars, his ghoulish threats and outré jokes ping-ponging across beats that sounded digitally processed and almost knowingly cheap. From his earliest efforts he was uniquely magnetic, though he was not alone: Los Angeles County was and is littered with disciples of the sound that rappers like Frostydasnowmann, Drakeo the Ruler, and Almighty Suspect began molding a few years prior. But over the past 10 months or so, Remble has tweaked the dials on this formula and settled on a new variant. He now raps with hyper-clear diction and a winking formality, as if he’s auditioning for the Broadway adaptation of his own life story.
This can have a chilling effect. The first verse on his debut record, It’s Remble, ends with him describing the aftermath of a shooting: “Bodies holding bodies/It was as if they were cuddling,” the as if giving the line an uncomfortably wistful air. But it also serves to make the new sound of L.A. rap more legible to a mass audience, both literally—unlike Drakeo’s, Remble’s vocals never dissolve into a growl or mumble—and by mostly excising the more inscrutable bits of slang and gang politics. (Neither are absent from Remble’s work, but they appear as asides rather than rabbit holes to fall down.) This March’s “Ted Talk,” for example, walks a fine tonal line, both lightly parodying and sincerely functioning as one of those post-Meek Mill intro, motivational thesis songs. It’s earnest and not; Remble is joking (“I might just sign a deal with a major—what’s independent?”) until he isn’t (“Remember when I wasn’t anything but a co-defendant”).
While It’s Remble, which is out on Warner, certainly argues for the rapper’s significant commercial potential, it also traces his vocal development. About half of its 13 songs are new, the others having been released in scattered drops dating back to January 2020. This makes it a telling document of an artist who’s burrowed into and now stands apart from a burgeoning scene, though it occasionally disserves the earlier records. See the way the oldest song included here, the deadpan “Watch How You Talk 2 Me,” is made to sound inchoate when placed next to “Audible,” where Remble’s sneer is fully realized as he cackles about someone getting booked and singing to the cops “like you were Jodeci.”
Remble is reliably funny—few rappers can go bar-for-bar with the BlueBucksClan guys, as he does here on “Book Bag”—and this sense of humor gives him the latitude to revisit the same jokes and threats over and over again, their effectiveness simply compounding. (This man really, really does not respect that you still wear True Religion.) So even as he bends this new style into potent near-pop, the most essential songs on It’s Remble are the two freestyles that radically expanded his audience in L.A.: last December’s “Ruth’s Chris Freestyle,” which pairs him with Drakeo, and this February’s “Gordon Ramsay Freestyle,” where he somehow makes the fact of his father’s life sentence tonally agree with the 2002 movie Juwanna Mann. And while “Ruth’s Chris” confirms Drakeo as the scene’s sharpest writer—“I beat life twice, I’m a two-timer/Shoe shiner/Flick of the wrist—Look! I bought new diamonds”—Remble’s calm, deliberate opening verse clearly identifies him as its most likely star.
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