The release of one of my favorite projects from 2021 — Kali Dreamer’s Super Jr. — seems much further away than nine flips of the calendar. It was a messy year, so messy that sometimes parts of 2020 creep into my remembrances of last year. It still doesn’t feel like we’ve entered 2022.
Super Jr. is a very lyrically condensed project despite the 18 tracks coming in at an average 2 minutes and 44 seconds. Of course there’s the surface level variable that Kali’s second 2021 project, Hype of the Living Dead, has three times as many tracks. But also, the six tracks clock in at an average of 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
What did this reveal to me about the two projects? Well, the tone is being taken at a much more aggressive pace this time around, which is an honest reflection of how things were back in October 2021 when the project was released. And, honestly, even now. Much like the argument for hyperpop reflecting modern-day feelings instead of being a projection for the future of music, the emotions were much more heightened.
This is most true for the first half of Hype, where the guitar work is screechier, the chanty lyrics — a staple of Kali’s previous odes to the pirate’s life — are delivered at a frantic pace, and each song clocks in at under two minutes. If we’re listening to the last two releases from the rapper back to back, it’s a total descent into madness from the melancholy tracks that close out Super Jr. This is best expressed by the opener, “Mellon Kali and the Infinite Radness,” when listeners are confronted with the line on more than one occasion: “What’s the point of fearing death when you’re already dead?”
When I messaged Kali about their influences and inspirations for this project specifically, this is what they wrote back:
“A lot of ‘80’s goth and post-punk stuff. The Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy. That was the kind of stuff I actually wanted to be writing at the time, but I have this unbreakable urge to use Hip-hop as the framework of my musical expression. I still managed to write one kinda-’80’s goth throwback song on there. I didn’t know what I wanted this project to sound like, but I knew I was gonna go bananas with the genre influences. That’s why, for better or for worse, every song sounds like a different genre.
“The Post-hardcore feel on the first track is absolutely due to the stuff I was listening to when I first started writing music. “Gravitron” is just me straight up doing a pop-punk song ‘cause who’s gonna stop me?”
On the second track, Kali picks up from where his pen last left off with the intro line: “I was working on a dream/And got trapped in an endless nightmare.” It’s also chillingly fitting that we hear Ian Curtis name-dropped on “66614.” But I think the tracks that end up sticking with you the longest aren’t the more hostile ones that probably resonate more at this point in time, but the songs where we’re hearing Kali lean into their most authentic self. That’s “Gravitron” and the closer “October, You Sleep So Soundly Now.” The latter calls back most to the Kali Dreamer sound that I was first mesmerized by. It is, of course, their ability to pack so many meaningful words into his breathless raps. It also is in the way he has crafted a sound all his own that I’m certain resonates with the other lonely internet scrollers out there.
Kali’s must is bound to blow up in this same digital realm. It’s just a matter of time.
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