Dan Flavin
Music Critic
Ski Mask the Slump God known most for work with the late XXXTentacion released his second studio “Stokeley” on Nov. 30 and he made up for his lack-luster “Beware the Book of Eli” earlier in the year.
Ski Mask is a promising young rapper with the release of his breakout mixtape “You Will Regret” in 2017 and his past work with XXXTentacion, but when he released his debut album it only sold 12k units the first week. The album’s most popular sing “DoIHaveTheSauce?” was great, but the rest of the album was not up to par with his unique flow and funny lines. However, “Stokeley” seems to bring back the old Ski, but with a more sophisticated style.
“Stokeley” starts out with track called “So High” with a catchy muted guitar loop and a different opening than usual singing and catchy chorus that isn’t followed by his trademark flow. Instead, he lets the beat play and continues to sing. Right of the bat, the listener knows this isn’t a usual Ski Mask album. One of the highlight tracks was “Foot Fungus.” The track is well-produced and Ski Mask seems to perfectly weave his incredible flow over the track. Another great track is “Save Me, Pt. 2 (feat. Austin Lam).” Using a chopped and distorted vocal as the base melody and a simple drum pattern, the song is instantly totally different from a normal Ski track. Austin Lam and Ski Mask split the chorus and each sing four bars, but the best part is Ski’s flow in his verse. Ski uses his unique style of mixing long words with quick bursts of flow and again incorporates a great melodic side to the track.
Although there were many highlights, the album is far from perfect. Ski Mask straying away and trying to create a different type of music is great, but sometimes he goes to far. Another flaw was tracks feeling boring and flat. For example, “Get Geeked” was very bland. Despite having a great beat Ski doesn’t do anything special as he just repeats the title for the chorus and doesn’t really do much with his flow. The worst track was “Nuketown (feat. Juice WRLD)”. We are huge fans of Juice, but the track felt like Ski was trying to replace his songs with XXXTentacion with Juice WRLD. Ski and X used to make this type of hard hitting screamo rap songs that were electric to listeners, but “Nuketown” feels like a failed attempt to please the crowd that misses X and Ski together.
Overall Ski Mask the Slump God’s sophomore album “Stokeley” was not the best work we have seen from the Florida rapper. The album still sold 51,000 units and charted number 6 on Billboard. He had some good songs like “Unbothered”, but some weak tracks like “Nuketown”. The production was good, but not many tracks stood out. Ski’s ability to rap is incredible, but his flow was boring in some of the tracks. The positives and negatives seem equal, so “Stokeley” gets a 5.5/10
Roberto Escamilla, and Nate Donohoe contributed to this article.
