Blackchai Is Indie Rap’s Next Not-So-Silent Assassin
The New Yorker’s head-spinning verses burst with leftist ideology, anime shout-outs, and nervy introspection.
Press play on any Blackchai song, and you’re immediately sucked into a vortex of anxiety and blistering technique. There’s an ominous tone to the beats he often chooses, marked by chopped-up strings, sour horn lines, and maudlin piano loops that suggest something cursed is around the corner—even if you can’t see it. As the dread swells and contracts, Chai’s words—a dizzying mix of cacophonous inner monologue, pop culture musings, and Black liberation and communist theologies—cut through the noise, as swift and steely as a drive-by.
On “Dissonant Strains,” a standout from his latest project, Otherwise a Blur, he calls himself an “unstoppable force of nature praying to the Four Elements.” The line is a reference to the idealized pillars hip-hop was founded upon—rapping, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti—a half-century ago, before its global sweep and commodification. But then Chai quickly clarifies that he’s no stuffy revival act: “Don’t try to bring the feeling back, better live in the moment.” He embodies the purity of rap’s original tenets but isn’t afraid to get irreverent—traditional bar structure and time signatures be damned.
The untrained ear might think Chai’s run-on-sentence raps are offbeat; others will clock them as a variation on the breathless style currently dominating corners of the hip-hop underground, championed by spitters like Phiik & Lungs or Backwoodz Studioz vet Billy Woods. But Chai’s flow is anything but flailing, and he’s far from a mindless follower.
The 30-year-old is frighteningly proficient on the mic, his crisp diction helping every word land like a body blow. Reading over his lyrics, you can see the fight against malaise and bigotry unfolding in his mind: “We never lackin’ where it matters/Methodology elastic, laughin’ at God,” he says on “Impermanence.” This isn’t passive music. And, easy as he might make it look, he’s not just throwing multisyllabic rhyme schemes together for the hell of it. His words and flows aim to break down the absurdity of American capitalism, resulting in an edifying clarity. Life is tense, and Chai’s delivery gives shape to that jittery mindstate, like he’s talking himself through a panic attack.
I first met Chai—government name, Tyler Antonini—earlier this year, when we were both lined up to buy a vinyl-only release at a pop-up shop put on by underground New York rap heroes Armand Hammer. We had mutual friends who were hanging outside the cramped boutique clothing store just off Canal Street in lower Manhattan, and we soon got to talking about our favorite Dipset deep cuts.
Off the mic, Chai, a short, light-skinned guy with his hair in brown twists poking out from the bottom of a beanie, is amiable and mild-mannered. He’s the type of person who can talk for hours about The Boondocks and the virtues of ’90s battle rapper Canibus if you prod him enough, but he isn’t a showoff about it. I hadn’t heard his music before we met at the pop-up, so when I saw him play a show at Soldato Books & Records in New Jersey a couple of months later, his enthusiastic performance knocked me on my ass.
When we formally meet for this piece over sandwiches and fries on an unusually balmy November afternoon, I learn just how far his love for music has taken him, literally and creatively. Chai grew up between Brewster, New York, about an hour-and-a-half north of the city, and Danbury, Connecticut—both overwhelmingly white areas—as the son of an African-American mother and an Italian father. Though neither of his parents were creatives, music was a constant in the house through the radio and records by the Jackson 5, Aaliyah, and DMX. He started playing guitar when he was 13 but didn’t get into music seriously until a couple of years later, when skateboarding friends like the producer Ewonee introduced him to punk and hardcore rap.
He played in a few bands here and there, and then started to record what he calls “super anime-flavored raps” under the name JinSol in the early 2010s. Shortly after, he moved to New Paltz, New York, where he formed Blackchai as a duo with his friend Vishnu Kalantrii. (“He was Indian, so… ‘Black chai,’ get it?”) After Kalantri graduated from college, he moved on from music and gave Chai his blessing to use the name.
At least geographically, Chai wasn’t looking to settle. From there, he moved on to Philly, where he joined the rap collective No Clue and released some of his earliest work as Blackchai, like 2020’s No Expectation and 2022’s Time & a Place. An omnivorous music fan, Chai listened to Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Links and albums by punk groups Jawbreaker and Mannequin Pussy while making Time & a Place. That’s also when he first got into Armand Hammer and loosened up his style.
For Chai’s next three projects—A Momentary Lapse, 2023’s Second Wind, and this March’s Year Wandering—he connected with Chicago producer A Haunted House, whose beats gave the projects a soulful drums-and-loops sound. “By the time I made Second Wind,” he remembers, “I was like ‘All right, I actually feel like I have my own thing going on.’” Listen to the martial sway of that album’s opening track “Stone Stance,” and you’ll hear a Rosetta Stone of Chai’s intent and fixations: He’s fighting through depression and finding solace in community-building via vintage rap slang and the occasional blast of socialist principles.
When Chai landed in Brooklyn at the start of 2023, he connected with Queens rapper-producer Cise Greeny and recorded most of what would eventually become Year Wandering—the first Blackchai project to catch a decent buzz. “I made a couple hundred dollars off Year Wandering in, like, a day,” he remembers. “I was getting great responses from people I’d never heard of and thinking, OK, I’m really doing this.”
Shortly after that record’s release, the veteran producer August Fanon, who’s worked with Armand Hammer as well as other indie-rap bold names like Mach-Hommy and Vic Spencer, hit Chai to congratulate him and propose working on a full-length together. He agreed. Fanon, an exhaustingly prolific beatmaker, sent a folder of 100 instrumentals for the rapper to choose from, and Chai worked diligently to whittle it down. What started as a planned five-song EP expanded into the 11-track Otherwise a Blur.
“I always wanted to make an album that felt like a mixtape, full of really hard raps,” Chai says of the record. (His main inspiration this time was Mach-Hommy’s Haitian Body Odor.) Chai’s cadences and writing are more frenetic than ever on Blur, a perfect complement to Fanon’s sprawling production. Take “Planetary Devastation,” which is backed by kalimba plinks, squawking horns, and phaser blasts that bubble with unease, as Chai and guest S!lence double-dutch through the madness. Or “Suit Tie N Halo,” whose muted drums and chimes pulse like exploding stars in the distance, while Chai’s musing on tabula rasa and outrunning long days tug the song back down to Earth.
At this point, cassette-tape copies of Otherwise a Blur are on the verge of selling out, and more scene vets are reaching out to him for features. He’s still a fan before anything, but even that’s slowly changing. When we ran into each other last month at another rap pop-up, where the legendary Ka made his final public appearance, Chai was standing in line outside as the rain soaked his wool sweater. A handful of fellow artists and fans approached him throughout the day to say peace and talk about his recent records. “It feels weird being recognized,” he told me that day, as we slowly worked our way through the merch line. When he finally got his turn to meet and speak with one of his heroes, it dawned on me that, soon enough, Blackchai may find himself on the other end of such a meaningful exchange.
