What the Freak and the Softness Share

Romano has braids and lives in Köpenick, which is the kind of outer-Berlin neighborhood that gets described as "forgotten" by people who’ve never been and "home" by everyone else. He makes music that shouldn’t cohere—genre-dissolving rap that slides between folk, pop, and something with no established name—and it coheres completely. His first album earned him a devoted following and the reputation of someone who didn’t need your approval to keep going.

Copyshop, his second album, finds him in a more expansive mood. He traveled to Hong Kong. His braids got longer. The beats got more polished without losing the handmade quality that made the first record feel like something pressed into your hands at a party you didn’t plan to attend. He’s still a street-level poet in the specific sense—greeting the neighbors by name, observing without condescension—but the canvas got bigger.

And then there’s Mutti. A love song for his mother, which should tip into sentimentality and instead just doesn’t. Romano writes about her with the same clear-eyed affection he brings to everything else: no mythology, no emotion-as-performance. Just a specific person who matters. That’s harder than it sounds. Most music about mothers is really about the singer’s relationship to vulnerability and nostalgia. Romano’s song is about an actual woman. The difference is audible.

He once described himself as a life coach who’s too much of a freak to be pinned down by any one audience. That reads like a joke but it’s also accurate. The fact that he wrote this particular song suggests the freak and the softness were never in conflict. They were always the same thing.