Taking Inventory on Lo Village
By Noah Adaikkalam
Lo Village, Maryland’s hottest new rap trio, dropped their second EP, Lost in America, on January 22nd of this year. The trio’s sound lives comfortably in a musical space completely unique to them, making it difficult to place in the larger scene. Their rhythms and lyricism cover an unexpectedly wide range, especially when considering their entire discography. Lo Village has found a way to balance harrowing statements about the personal and generational struggles they face in America with loving sentiments directed towards friends and family, with a healthy dose of shoutouts to athletes from everyone from Dante Culpeper to Zion Williamson.
The group initially came together in 2015. MC Kane, a producer, rapper, and founder of their label, Rebel Music Collective, initially teamed up with Charles Tyler. Their stunning lead vocalist, and Kane’s sister, Ama, joined later that year and the trio came out strong with their first EP, Last Summer, in late August of 2016.
The EP is a good start. Utilizing longer track lengths, they focus on narrative lyrics and aren’t afraid to experiment with lo-fi sounds and claim their own corner of the neo-soul genre. Their bread and butter is Chris laying down verses that tell stories while Ama sings them together. Occasionally they break this form, Chris and Kane singing a few bars, or Dirty Shafi, an LA rapper with a complimentary sound, featuring on the track to do the same.
That said, it is obvious that this is their starting point. You can trace their sounds in Lost in America back to here, like Ama’s sing-rapping, or Shafi’s influence, elements that have become staples of their later works. The production stays a little rough around the edges, but this texture mirrors the humanity woven into their music.
“Here We Go,” the second half of “7:45/Here We Go” is my pick from this album. It’s simple, a little keys riff with a somber verse from Charles that contemplates loneliness and brings the song home. You can picture the trio standing on a cliff and looking over the edge into the ambiguity that their career holds.
For the Birds, a joint album with Dirty Shafi, came out a year later, in 2017. This is where I feel their work really finds its groove as the four artists bounce off one another, balancing the sound, and getting comfortable enough to share intimate moments of their lives. “Sun & Moon,” probably my all time favorite song by Lo Village, comes from this project. Kane starts with a recording of him talking to his kid, reminding them that they can always be better than him, before diving into a song about responsibility, purpose, and dreams.
This is the album where they begin to fully take advantage of their vocal talent, with Ama singing choruses, verses, and vocalizing in all the space in between. Lo Village also brought on Shafi and Kwame, two talented male vocalists to round Ama’s sound, the best example of this being “So Good” where Shafi and Ama sing over each other, articulating two conflicting sides of a relationship.
Their production sharpens a lot too, the musicality focusing, honing in on the neo-soul, lo-fi pop melodies that they had played with initially. “Too Late” and “Old Thing Back” utilize simple brassy guitar riffs, and “Lil Mama” and “Waste My Time” do the same with atmospheric synth riffs, blending them into kicks and snares with contemplative lyrics and angelic singing. The biggest growth in production comes in tightening up their transitions, helping connect two or three songs at a time.
“Lil Mama”, the hit of this album and their most streamed song on Spotify, was played in Isa Rae’s groundbreaking HBO show Insecure, in episode 2, season 4, “Lowkey Distant.” It is impossible to not move while listening to this song. Its synth baseline bumps up and down with Kwess’s chorus as Kane and Shafi take shots at verses. It has one of my favorite lyrics of all time, “She wanted Benihana, I took her to Roscoes,” and ends with a quick atmospheric verse from Ama that sounds like water gently tumbling down a stream.
It is important to mark this album as the turning point for Ama’s vocals. Because of how prominent her voice becomes in their later projects, it is safe to assume that For the Birds was the proving ground where she claimed her talent and ability to be a star power vocalist. Later in their discography, tracks are released that center around her, which we will get into later. You can trace those back to “Waste My Time,” “So Good,” and “Real One P.2,” in For the Birds where she sings her abstract phrases and flourishes that show off how purely beautiful her voice is.
Ama’s singing is exactly where their next project picks up. The first track on their third EP, It Takes a Village, is “NERD,” which was dropped as a single before the full project was released. “NERD” features Ama singing in a weary tone, reassuring herself throughout —starting and ending the song—while Kane and Charles throw bars about balancing their success while contemplating the binary between ambitions and temptations as they grow as artists.
This project is focused, instrumentally, on the sound that they found so much success with in “Lil Mama,” and lyrically on finding their niche, as artists and humans, articulated throughout the album.
The track lengths shorten up, and Ama ties the entire project, rather than individual songs, together with her singing. They went out-of-house for a producer, collaborating with Frankie Scoca, an up-and-coming New York producer. As a result, It Takes a Village sounds like a brand name studio project: whatever scuffs were left disappear and the tracks flow effortlessly into one another, connected through a refreshing musicality that draws from the Lo Village repertoire. This is their first project where themes, thoughts, and sounds are consistently stretched across the entire album. Where For the Birds is being happy with painting your nails yourself, It Takes A Village is bringing the bank to the nail salon and getting something your Instagram feed is going to see for weeks.
It seems that, in It Takes a Village, Lo Village is solidifying, claiming what works for them, and turning the sonic space discovered on their last two projects into a home. You hear them having fun too: “Jefe’s House” and “For the Kids” are lighter in their tones, the vocals flexing a little bit, and the beats jumping, similar to “Lil Mama,” so you can’t help but to groove.
This comes at no cost of content. Their lyrics are still as genuine as they were before; the first half of the album remains in an introspective place, with the trio singing about love, love lost, wealth, expectations, aspirations, and trying to find yourself amongst all of the existential questions that come with being a human. It is through this self-exploration that you see the group find itself, as well as becoming more and more comfortable with one another.
A lot of other music journalists claim that Lo Village has defined their own genre, and I think this is the project that really did it. They surrender no vulnerability, yet they expand their process, molding their sound to work for them. This is showcased in their final track, “Show and Tell” which brings the EP to a sobering end in which Lo Village laments legacy and what they’ve gone through over the course of their journey, not necessarily as musicians, but as women and men, to get to where they are now.
So, it should be no surprise that their latest project, dropped January 22nd of this year, Lost in America, is what it is. The cover, a black and white portrait of Ama looking stoically—almost pointedly—at the camera, adds an urgency to the project. It sounds like a love letter to people who struggled through last year, specifically because it has never been more obvious that America has never existed for them.
They incorporated two more producers, Blvck Rose and Bird Language, as well as bringing Frankie back for the album’s single, “Terry Crews.” Their sound improves further as they continue to master what they’re doing. It stays familiar— the same kicks, instrumental heavy melodies, and perfect blending of singing and rapping, so you know you’re listening to Lo Village—yet, as with For the Birds, the introduction producers, more minds, helps them expand on their signature and makes this project elite. They took the genre established with their last three projects and have begun expandings and creating multitudes within the genre that explore single pieces. “Run,” for example uses their textbook synthey, cloudy keys riffs and kick drums, yet they mixed in a siren, walkie talkie clicks, and recordings from social justice rallies, reminding me of Free Jazz records from the 60s.
You can have the music of this album playing in the background as you’re doing something else, and one of the lyrics will sneak its way down into your chest and make you stop, rewind, and listen to the entire song again,grappling with the testimony presented to you. It’s hopeful—loving almost—despite the fact that the trio is coming to terms with a horrible reality.
The best example of this is “Out the Window,” which starts with a recording from the “Free Huey!” protest in Oakland in 1968 and builds into a loud percussive production that claps and rolls the entire song, and drips down to your feet while you listen so your foot starts tapping.
This is Lo Village’s greatest attribute: their ability to tell their truths and, by extension, truths that have been systematically silenced, in a way that is full of hope and love. It reminds the listener how personal these issues they are confronting are, that, at the end of the day, what we are dealing with is people like them who have lives and thoughts and feelings as complex as their five-year-old discography. You hear this as soon as The Lost in America EP starts; the first lyrics of the entire project are: “I’m so sick / woah / they just shot my baby / right in front of me.”
This is why you should listen to Lo Village. This rap trio is ahead of its time in terms of message, production, sound, and presentation. Where they are at right now reflects a seasoned maturity, as they have defined and claimed their own genre, staying true to themselves and publishing through their own label, while simultaneously and consistently perfecting their sound.
What makes listening to Lo Village even more interesting is the ability to trace this growth back through their discography. You can see how Last Summer’s “7:45/ Here We Go,” a contemplative song about lost love that culminates in intimate singing over a simple beat, leads to “So Good” on For the Birds. The concepts for the songs are similar, but, in “So Good,” you hear both sides of a complicated relationship singing with and against each other at the same time.
You can see how “NERD,” the single from It Takes a Village, formed their blueprint of an upbeat, stand-alone track that delivers a socially conscious message while having a beat that moves. “Terry Crews” on the sequential Lost in America EP, is mixed a little slower, a little more atmospheric, but builds into another take on a danceable feel-good song that sings and raps it’s way through a message of supporting your people. Both were singles, and you can see the evolution of one into the other.
If you take it all the way back, start with “Ridin” (2016), to “Lil Mama” (2017), to “For the Kids” (2019), and end with “Out the Window” (2021). All these songs are upbeat, percussive, with more instrumentality than expected, and have a heavy tone underneath, with hard-hitting, personal lyrics. Lo Village is evolving and becoming more proficient with each iteration of the track, the production getting cleaner and the message clearer, until you have a masterpiece like “Out the Window.”
I can’t wait for whatever is coming up next. I haven’t put their music down since Lost In America came out last month. They keep getting better, hitting harder, singing and producing more beautiful music, all while expanding and solidifying their distinctly Lo Village sound.
Their music is available on all major streaming platforms.