BLIP

On ‘BLIP,’ rapper NAHreally shares witty observations of ordinary life over airy, melodic beats by The Expert. For the highly original and unpretentiously fun album, the emcee-producer duo is joined by Open Mike Eagle, Hemlock Ernst (b.k.a. Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands), Dillon (Full Plate), and Jesse The Tree (Strange Famous Records).

‘BLIP’ marks a hat-trick of collaborative albums for The Expert. Last year’s ‘Ritual’ with Stik Figa reached a myriad of ‘Best Albums of 2023’ lists and was also praised by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Together with Jermiside, The Expert kicked off his series of psychedelic hip-hop records with ‘The Overview Effect,’ featured on NPR's ‘Best New Music’ and Bandcamp Daily’s monthly column ‘The Best Hip-Hop,’ among others.

For NAHreally, ‘BLIP’ is his official debut on vinyl, following a range of digital tapes with, most notably, 2022’s ‘HACKINAWAY’ (Mutombo Records) and 2021’s ‘Loose Around the Edges.’ In the words of DEF Magazine: “NAHreally’s music channels the mid-aughts free-flowing jazz rap renaissance while infusing it with the lyrical abstraction of top modern underground MCs.”

On ‘BLIP,’ NAHreally shows that there are fun ways to rap about everyday life. From boredom to basketball, or how his “ankles creak, and my left pinky’s bent” on the Open Mike Eagle-assisted single ‘Breaking Down In Real Time.’ NAHreally turns scenes of the mundane into playful rhymes. A homage to the ordinary life on this pale blue dot.

“NAHreally has an admirable ability to use the structure of rap songs to expose life’s little absurdities,” Dad Bod Rap Pod’s Nate LeBlanc states in the liner notes. “BLIP is full of humor, pathos, life lessons, and well-honed skills displayed in a cohesive package that brings to mind a slew of well-chosen cultural touchstones that have been fed into the MPC. (...) Think of it like a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedy of manners, with more banging beats and an acute awareness of the awkwardness of ‘rap hands.’” 

For The Expert, working on BLIP was his most intensive collaborative process to date. The two went back and forth over eighteen months, sharing close to a hundred four-bar loops as short ideas. From there, NAHreally and The Expert used those loops and melodies as building blocks to flesh out the sound for BLIP together. The Expert: “I use samples from lots of different records and add my own bass lines, drums, and synth lines—such as the outro piano and strings on ‘All At Once,’ even adding my own ‘aah’ background vocals à la Pete Rock. However, my overall goal is that I want all parts and samples to sound like they came from the same source. So you actually can’t decipher what’s been played or sampled; to make it sound like all the elements were always meant to be together.”