There’s a Radiohead reference on “Lonely” off of “Old”, Danny Brown’s second full album- “Radiohead shit, fiends with the Bends”. In fact, Danny Brown also has a song called “Radio Head”, and has talked about listening to “A Moon Shaped Pool” a lot. His new album is called “Atrocity Exhibition” after a Joy Division song. He’s talked about Talking Heads and Nine Inch Nails being influences. At first the band music influences might seem strange because Danny Brown is so often straight up rap- a lot of his songs don’t even have hooks and rarely feature guest verses, they’re just a focused series of brilliant lines about Detroit poverty, self-deprecation, sex and dealing dope.

But what music nerds love about music from the likes of Radiohead and Joy Division is also what can be found on Danny Brown albums, and is something that is precious and rare in hip-hop, but which is pretty common to music in other genres- cohesion, sometimes thematic, even narrative or pseudo-narrative, quite simply all the songs being about something similar or related such that the album can be come to thought of as a complete “Album” rather than just a collection of songs. Think “OK Computer” and how it’s consistently about modern isolation/technology. “Cohesive” is a music nerd’s favourite word for this exact reason- they like deepening their albums by studying them as if they were works of literature, and improving their perceived quality by tying threads through the songs and making it part of an entire “point” or narrative. Think how people try to find a story or characters in “Aeroplane Over the Sea” or how people try to figure out all the clues and lyrics on Death Grips albums. Some of the most popular and culty hip-hop albums are either deliberately cohesive in this fashion or have thematic unity forced upon them by fans- think “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” or “Good Kid Maad City”. And there’s nothing wrong with any of this.

In fact, I do it a lot too. Even albums which are almost wilfully “Just a collection of songs” I try to make all about one thing in my head, and then analyse it to death and write silly pieces about it like I am now. The Mountain Goats’ “All Eternals Deck” I make entirely about survival stories in my head, and then it all makes sense as a whole, and when I was younger I was a huge fan of Green Day’s attempts to do rock opera with a narrative. I still love listening for a story on “Ziggy Stardust”. There’s a good reason for this practice, which is that it makes the album way cooler on subsequent listen throughs because it makes the moments where the narrative comes to the forefront big peaks of sorts where it all comes together and means a lot more, and is a lot more moving to me.

Going back to Danny Brown, XXX was a project tied together by an idea- being old, that is, 30, but still fucking himself up on drugs and getting into crazy shit and indulging in depravity. This was nicely summed up by XXX meaning both triple X stuff like sex and drugs but also being Roman numerals for 30, and, in a classic move of album unity, the wordplay bookended the album as the songs “XXX” and “30”. 30’s goosebump-raising apotheosis was accordingly reached in these lines:

“And now a nigga 30 so I don’t think ya heard me

That the last 10 years I’ve been so fucking stressed

Tears in my eyes let me get this off my chest

Thoughts of no success got a nigga chasing death

Doing all these drugs hope I OD the next XXX”

Notice again how the album starts with the words 30, and ends with XXX. These lines come as a final slip into emotional clarity, indicated in part by the voice change- this is the same song that Danny started, in his high pitched yelp voice that puts so many people off: “Sent ya bitch a dick pic / and now she need glasses”, which helps with the other cohesion, which is typically taken as something along the lines of “Rapper who lets his sorrow through when it’s not being drowned in sex, drugs or humour”, a balance between fun and serious that is played with to great effect on songs like “Die Like a Rockstar”.

Old takes this a step further by being imbedded in its entirety with a similar piece of wordplay to do with “Old”. Old as in getting old (being over 30), the “Old” Danny Brown in terms of musical sound and “classic” rap, Old as in Danny’s past and sharing it, Old as in “having been around”. This “imbedding” begins with the tracklisting. As Pitchfork points out: “The album is divided into a “Side A” and a “Side B,” an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown’s unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom”. Side A beings with “Side A: Old”, as in, a kind of joke about expecting the “old” sound, because the first half is more traditional, then Side B begins with “Side B: Dope Song”, a kind of joke about people who would suggest that Danny just makes party songs now, because Side B is almost all “party” songs- so it’s ironically titled “Dope Song” as in a generic song about Dope selling, but also a “Dope song”, as in, a simplification of meaning in explanation prompted by the fact that it’s a sick beat. The song itself is then about how he’s not going to make any more songs about selling dope, which layers potential readings of it further and gives people something to dig into before even hearing the song.

The party songs are kind of nightmare party songs though, with nauseating, piercing beats and endless descriptions of drugs and sex. It’s deranged and a kind of deliberate denial to the idea that you’d want to party to these songs, so Danny ends up using the textures of party music to explain the craziness of his life by kind of tricking the listener. And that’s another hallmark of the songs being more than just a collection- the order is crucial, and float on simply has tome come at the end to make Danny’s whole point about depression and drug-haziness, and of course to contrast the rest of Side B. There are many more connected threads and ideas in the album, as well as reference to past Danny Brown work and the idea of “Old”, like the whole Wonderbread story or the ideas of escaping past trauma.

And he’s one of the few rappers paying this sort of attention to making a full album and having it be really about something, or about the rapper as a character. This is interesting to think about going into his next album because Old was heavy handed with a lot of the exposition and had some weaknesses. The hook to Torture was sort of obvious and not a lot of the songs on Side B are actually that great. Float On, as much as I love that song and how it ties things up, is also a little generic in the verses. But Atrocity Exhibition might be the best Danny Brown album, and, I’m predicting, one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, partially because Danny’s had the time to work on it fully and is going to be incorporating that “band music cohesion”. But moreover if it does incorporate a general cohesive idea (I know I’m using the world cohesive too much and too generally) then it will also end up being CONSIDERED, by rap and music nerds, one of the best hip-hop albums. Particularly if they can find something in it to write about.