Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals Keep It Concerningly Real on “Sometimes, Papi Chulo”

When I first heard rapper Brian Ennals and producer Infinity Knives in 2022, I thought, “Oh, the government’s definitely tapping their phones.” The Baltimore duo had just released their breakout album King Cobra, a raucous project filled with lines like “Nation of Islam is feds/Malcolm X found out, and that’s why he’s dead” set to clanging drums and Speed Racer-level synths. But as unapologetic about the state of the world as Ennals’ lyrics were, the album’s transgressive feeling owed as much to his willingness to be tender and personal, and music as eclectic in sound as it is in perspective. Songs like “A Melancholy Boogie” pit Ennals’ well wishes to his late father against static-y bits of electro-funk, while “Sambo’s Last Words” is a synth dirge full of life lessons and blunt realizations (“I just realized the American flag the same color as cop lights”). There are people behind these tracks, making them more than just quotables ready for the front of a t-shirt.

Ennals and Knives’ forthcoming project, A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, was already one of my most anticipated, and the searingly soulful lead single “Sometimes, Papi Chulo” is another stylistic curveball. Knives conjures up a warm cumbia rhythm interpolated from Dan Hanrahan’s “Three Waves,” with Gabriela Bibiana’s vocals and guitar sauntering and swaying at a much calmer clip than usual for this duo. But Ennals sounds fired up, channeling banal life setbacks and intrusive thoughts into his coarse sing-raps, describing the way his brother once caught him jerking off as breezily as he does his suicidal ideation. It can be hard to tell when we’re supposed to laugh or cry taking all of this in, and that feels like the point—these anecdotes are studied and specific and land with force over an eminently danceable beat.

Ennals and Knives have bristled at audiences referring to their music as “political” in the past, and it’s easy to see why—most people don’t want to be reduced to sloganeering mouthpieces, even if they’ve been handcuffed and beaten by the cops. And while it’s nice to see two musicians unafraid to be blunt in ways that even the staunchest leftists might find terrifying, I think their approach involves more than that. Some of these lyrics chronicle desperate situations—the kind that come about in a country where Medicaid and EBT can be shut down in the blink of an eye—but others are just about getting blazed after finding an eviction notice on your door and admitting that, yes, sometimes money can buy happiness. As Black men, most everything they say or do will be seen as political no matter what. But more than that, they’re raw and real, refusing to turn their heads away from the horrors and little wins of modern society. You don’t need to be a politician to see the value in that.