Pink Siifu and 454 Are Reimagining the Statement Rap Album

As culture continues to barrel ahead at the speed of snippets, it always feels like the very idea of an album is on the chopping block—especially in rap. Depending on whom you ask, rap albums went out of style when record labels exclusively began chasing one-hit wonders and ringtone sales in the 2000s, or over the last decade or so, when listening habits leaned toward playlisting and social media-friendly soundbites. Yet the desire to make—and to hear—a full-length holistic artistic statement endures.

Superstars with grand ambitions and carefully manicured rollouts get the most eyes, but the underground and indie spaces are also flush with artists intent on keeping that attention-span-expanding spirit alive. Two recent examples, Pink Siifu’s Black’!Antique and 454’s Casts of a Dreamer, are both capital-A Albums overflowing with vision, personality, and quality music. Since the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy era, major statement rap albums have favored blow-out spectacle and obsessive curation, like they’re aspiring to be the next prestige TV show or superhero movie ready to be binged and forgotten about in a few weeks. The long runtimes of the Siifu and 454 records run counter to that impulse, giving the artists space to be messy, contradictory, and experimental. Each one is intimidatingly long by streaming standards: Dreamer boasts 29 songs, though many of them run less than a couple of minutes; Black’!Antique has 19 tracks, with several stretching past the six-minute mark. But anyone can make a long-ass album. What really pushes these into a special light is what they do with all that sprawl.

The Alabama-born Siifu is used to creating on an epic scale. Though he’s best known for the sepia-toned beats and pensive raps of his 2018 breakthrough Ensley, much of his early work under the name Iiye (pronounced “eye”) was already smashing disparate influences together: the slow-churned Texas sludge of DJ Screw and the jazz freakouts of Sun Ra, the Southern-fried soul of Dungeon Family and the thundering theatrics of Detroit protopunk pioneers Death. As he’s matured, those fusions have become more focused. At this point, each new Siifu project is embedded with a vow to make any zone a comfort zone.

Black’!Antique brings a greater sense of purpose to that commitment, with Siifu happy to play the role of musical dot-connector as much as rapper or producer. His braintrust has ballooned to include a small army of like minds, ensuring the idea well never runs dry. Not only is it his most expansive project yet, it serves as a thesis for his entire discography. Part of that thesis is spelled out explicitly by Atlanta legend Big Rube in the album’s final seconds, over a billowing bass line and vocal coos: “My people are original and divinely unique/And our value will keep rising, like some black antiques.” In this sense, an antique is a diamond in the rough, forward-thinking but with a firm grip on its roots and where it fits in the zeitgeist. 

The range and consistency from song to song is awe-inspiring. The second track “Alive & Direct’!”—which credits 13 different producers—is a soupy mix of Merzbow-indebted noise rock, 808s, and synths rattling like gunfire, while Siifu beats his chest in front of the world. Songs like “Sacrifice’!BonAppetit” and “Screw4Life’! RIPJalen’!” crack their chaotically glitchy shells wide open to reveal pastel interiors before the audio shrapnel returns. Others slam the brakes for a brief stop into sludgy alt-rap or, like on the thumping, HiTech-produced “Facecard,” decamp to horny dancefloors. The Vayda-featuring “PSA’!” splits the difference between plugg music and dream pop. Black’!Antique remains restless, with genres, moods, and tones aggressively turning corners into the unknown.

But the sprawl of Black’!Antique never feels unwieldy. Siifu is the binding agent at the center, claiming his legacy as a multi-hyphenate and talking his shit every chance he gets. On the jazzy “Last One Alive’!,” he waves off listeners trying to figure out his next move and competition looking to dismantle what he’s built. “Leave all that on the internet/Shit, I never been fluke,” he hisses before extending the back of his hand: “I can’t teach drive, but I can show you what to do.” “Drive” is the key word here. You need a lot of it to pull as many corners of the music world together as Siifu does on Black’!Antique. The album may not be as diaristic as his other work, but the way he threads various inspirations—from Prince and Sun-Ra to Grace Jones and Missy Elliott—says as much about Siifu as words could.

If Siifu is speaking through collage and community-minded collaboration, then Florida rapper-producer 454 is speeding deliriously through life in his own lane. He makes the kind of music you might hear if you could convert an Icee sugar rush into a waveform: springy, thick, colorful, and often moving at supersonic speed. Since his beginnings on SoundCloud at the start of this decade, and especially following his 2022 breakout Fast Trax 3, the blissed-out vibes of his beats—somewhere between pluggnb and Florida fast music—and constant pitch-shifting of his vocals have given 454’s work a cartoonish feel. But even a cursory glance at his lyrics shows there’s more going on beneath the surface. 

In content, he’s a lifestyle rapper, moving from flexes, nostalgic pining, and an endless wave of romances and close encounters that feel episodic. His latest album, Casts of a Dreamer, originally uploaded as a single hour-long track to SoundCloud last October before appearing on other streaming services earlier this year, continues to revel in his signature bacchanalia. There’s no strict narrative, but the frequent contrasts between music and lyrics, along with a loose dream motif, make it sound much more than a data dump. 

A sampled narrator from an old Discovery Channel show floats in at the end of a handful of Cast’s songs to talk about dreams as a sort of waking life, and to pontificate on whether their meaning comes from within or from the way we interpret them. These interludes emphasize the stream-of-consciousness nature of the music, as 454 connects thoughts of outrunning the dark pull of the inner city to gratefulness that his mother remains an emotional rock. When he talks about watching his father cook drugs and losing his brother on “316,” or about making it back to the house for instant ramen and PS2 games before nightfall on “Tem’s Flip,” it’s with the same bouncy zeal and speed with which he celebrates pulling off a lick on “Mike Carroll.” There’s no L he can’t flip into a W, and thugging it out leads him down as many bright paths as it does dark ones. On “Between Us,” love from a partner holds him down through familial and financial setbacks. “That loyalty’ll have a nigga feelin’ sentimental,” he says, the pause between “a” and “nigga” emphasizing how choked up her support has him. 

But fighting through the bad feelings is just one part of the 454 experience, which runs the gamut from straight storytelling bar-fests on “Globetrotter” to bag-blowing love songs like “Moto City Bag.” Don’t let the helium-tinged voice fool you—this guy’s kicking some real shit. And the beats, mostly self-produced with a handful of outside credits, play an equal role in fleshing out the cel-shaded world 454 runs through. “316” and “Bout It” reimagine the frenetic sounds of Florida fast music with a sinister trance twist. “Amiga” is a sweaty house jam with flashes of chiptune; “Bittersweet” is a cold funk groove fitted with skipping hi-hats. Many of these songs transition seamlessly into the next, further highlighting the borderless landscapes of 454’s dreams and reality.    

454’s command over the sprawl of Casts of a Dreamer is impressive, but not in the same way as Siifu’s on Black’!Antique. Siifu takes wilder swings and makes bolder reaches across genres, aiming to hit the jack-of-all-trades status of his idols and carry a musical think tank on his back. 454’s vision is detail-rich but more insular and terse. Neither of these projects tell stories or chart a growth arc in the traditional sense, but they still stand as sterling examples of what a rap album can be today because of the message at their cores: Take me—all of me—as I am.