LUH TYLER BRINGS A FRESH SOUND TO A NOSTALGIC STYLE ON ‘MY VISION’

The debut album by Florida emcee Luh Tyler is a breath of fresh, marijuana-laced air among the street rap zeitgeist’s taste trends toward nervy, Detroit production and the paranoiac influence of drill subgenres. He reflects the careless finesse of mid-2010s SoundCloud rap, shuffling through a deck of stock flexes with a nonchalance that feels like bass-heavy easy listening music while floating on jazz samples and actual plugg beats by BeatPluggz member Polo Boy Shawty.

He’s not the only one that likes plugg. Tyler’s sound on My Vision is particularly reminiscent of the underground rap that dominated in 2016, when the now-teenage rapper was only 10 years old. The movement has been subject to many reinterpretations in recent years, inspiring the baroque trap that has thrived around ATL producers like Popstar Benny and the PluggnB wave.

Songs like “Ransom” and the album’s title track would have fit in well with the flood of YouTube uploads Famous Dex and Rich the Kid made after releasing their Rich Forever II mixtape, or they might have shared playlist space with Humble Haitian and Kodak Black’s “Boomerang,” a groundbreaking Florida plugg song that helped to shape Tyler’s artistic vision. Despite his voice being noticeably raspy, he has a talent for purposefully blending into the background of hazy instrumentals, the textural contrast having an almost hypnotic effect.

Tyler’s speech lilts and drifts out at the end of each bar on the highlight song “Hit the Top,” dissolving into an electric keyboard and warm woodwinds that seem like clouds in the background. It’s sheer decadence—beautiful enough to dismiss Tyler’s lyricism’s relative dullness as an aesthetic choice.

Though the verse “now look at us now / yeah, now we at Rolling Loud / zaza got me in the clouds / we at the top, know mama proud” doesn’t seem very spectacular on paper, Tyler’s fluid triplet glides make up for it in performance.Tyler’s lack of content on a track like this would be compared to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports’ insufficient use of dissonance. The experience would suffer from too much intricacy.

This idea is supported by Babytron’s participation in the remix of the early track “Fat Racks.” The Michigan guest performer technically outperforms his host by layering jokes about DC superheroes, 1990s NBA stat lines, and his February arrest, but Tyler’s charismatic delivery of references to marijuana strains and his Instagram crushes always shines through.

On “Gettin’ Fishy,” two local collaborators SCY Jimm and Wizz Havinn complement Tyler considerably more successfully by contributing drowsy yet nimble verses to a menacing, piano-driven beat. In contrast to the unbothered Tyler, Jimm and Wizz deliver their drill-adjacent bars with the same focus on atmosphere that makes Tyler’s solo music so potent.

However, Tyler performs at his best when he is in his natural environment. The instrumental that drives “Moncler on My Coat” would lead you to believe that he jammed a tiny string ensemble into the recording studio goes deep into his penchant for the opulent. The hi-hats flicker and the 808s hit with a muted thud before disappearing completely. The song is a soft, refined extension of Tyler’s unflappable swag: “any beat I hop on, that bitch a hit,” he moans, oozing with assurance to support his claim. His voice and flow arsenal fit in perfectly on any production that has a tinge of serenity.

My Vision, Luh Tyler’s absorbing and frequently tranquil debut album, establishes his position as an outlier in the current rap world. Even when he hops on tracks with obliquely Midwestern drum patterns, his music is too slow-paced to fit in with the post-Detroit crowd, and it isn’t experimental enough to be grouped with the new generation of underground musicians pushing plugg into uncharted terrain.

For those who yearn for the days when Wiz Khalifa, Rich the Kid, and Kodak Black could jump on any beat, it’s more like comfort food—easy listening with 808s. You would struggle to find a better mixtape to unwind to in 2023 if Luh Tyler didn’t push himself and his influences hard enough.