Frankfurt Sent Fire

You can dislike Bausa’s Was du Liebe nennst—"What You Call Love"—as much as you want. It won’t leave. That’s the whole problem. One listen and the hook is in there, looping, and all your sophisticated taste counts for nothing. While everyone who considers themselves above German rap smugly circles the drain, his crew has been quietly building something real: that particular strain of music that absorbs American trap, chillhop, and mumble rap but roots it in something that actually sounds like the cities it comes from.

Reezy is part of that crew, and his new mixtape Feueremoji is the evidence. The Frankfurt rapper moves through tracks like "Zombies" and "High Class Street Fashion" covering the standard coordinates—expensive food, coveted streetwear, the specific vertigo of success arriving faster than you expected—but what makes the tape hold together is the stranger stuff underneath: anxiety about the future that doesn’t feel performed, some half-serious mythology about superpowers, a Japan fixation that I understand completely. Bausa shows up on a few tracks, which was inevitable and welcome.

I’ve been playing Feueremoji loud enough that the neighbors have developed opinions. That seems like a reasonable outcome.