Hi, everyone. Cozyboy Tano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new 2slimey album, High Anxiety.

Here we have the new debut album of, I believe, Oklahoma-native 2slimey, a rapper who I saw for the first time weeks, if not a few months ago, randomly popping up on my Instagram Reels feed with a video not too much unlike this one. In fact, it may have been this one. It's hard to tell. The guy's always wrapping and flexing at very much the same convenience store, with a booming trap beat turned up to 11 for that full rage effect.

But there was something different about 2slimey in this current landscape of blunt rimes and ultra-distorted trap beats, even with artists like OsamaSon, as well as Che, taking things to the extreme this year. But the noise and distortion levels in 2slimey's music are almost comical. To the point where I presumed this vertical video was some like parody or remix. But a 2slimey sound is actually real, and he is deadly serious.

And while his presence may be relatively obscure now, with about 50K followers on Instagram, and about as many monthly Spotify listeners currently, his music definitely points in a direction that a lot of rage's most buzzed about artists are headed in right now. Even hopping on beats from producers that are very popular in the scene at the moment like wegonebeok.

Now, if you're at all, for whatever reason, unfamiliar with r age at this point, it is a rap subgenre that has been gaining steam over the past five years and was really put on the map by artists like Playboy Cardi. It's a style that has often been highlighted for its aggressive sound, nihilistic vibes, and abrasive mixes, and slimey.

He embraces all of these characteristics to such an extreme that he honest to God has tracks that are closer in vibes to a basement power electronics performance than anything you might dare categorize as rap music. I mean, it's basically noise, and I don't mean that in a mom and dad saying, "Hey, turn that noise down sort of way. I mean in a way to where the sounds of this music style are getting so brutal to where dudes hovering over distortion pedals and contact mics on a concrete floor are not sounding that much nastier.

You could take tracks on slimey's last mixtape, for example, like "SaddestStory", which sounds literally like some obscure noise producer screaming random proclamations over searing walls of distorted bass, as well as booming beats and random vocal delays and sound effects flying throughout the mix. It honestly makes some experimental artist's music sound tame by comparison.

Now, I will also say there are some relatively tame and conventional sounding trap cuts on this mixtape. And, by comparison, High Anxiety is a much more focused effort in terms of there being a pretty uniform style and sound across all of the tracks here, as I think 2slimey tries to find a bit of a middle ground between his most extreme and accessible influences. But in the end, he still ends up with a result that by modern rap standards, modern rage standards even, is pretty out there, because I do think this album delivers some of the most intense auditory abuse you could subject yourself to in 2025.

Now, the entire thing here is 13 tracks, 23 minutes, which I think works, because anything longer than that, I think, would be asking a bit too much of the listener. And slimey doesn't exactly ease fans into the vibes, either.

As the intro track is firing on all cylinders, even with this little synth intro that sounds like something you would get out of some digital Christmas music box knickknack, nestled in a mix that sounds like it was pulled out of some 10-year-old bass-boosted, deep-fried meme. And slimey's voice slices through all this mayhem with neon-colored auto-tune and disorienting vocal delays, too. And for as unforgiving as this track is, I'm actually surprised to catch as much structure and detail in it as I do, because you get these repeated refrains of "bring them out," these beat transitions, too. So there is most definitely a controlled chaos element to slimey's performances and writing here. It's not random.

I actually found that a lot of the songs in the tracklist here don't blend together as easily as you might think, given how loud and distorted they all are. Like the opening sliding synth cords that kick off, "I serve bass", would grab attention following any song. I was actually blown away, too, by how many bass frequencies were coming through in these mixes, even with them sounding as fried as they are.

I mean, for example, playing the track "Roc" in the car, I was a little afraid I was going to blow a speaker, because the bass was so deep, and loud, and rumbling.

We get very much the same level of volume and intensity on the start of "In her Jaw", too. It made me feel like I was watching one of those decked-out car stereo system tests on my phone. So I'm not really sure whether or not this record underwent a very careful mastering process. Maybe I'm wrong.

Another song that really grabbed my attention in the tracklist was "Rolling Off Molly", which kicks off with these really sticky and catchy anthemic guitar-like lead melodies and stuttering hi-hat and snare patterns that made me feel like I was at a Lightning Bolt show in 2005. But if you could take Brian Chippendale's voice and run it through some auto-tune. This is all maybe even more so the case for the following pop a lot, which feels like if you could do a trap remix of an early Dan Deacon song, and again, raise the distortion all the way up to 11.

Now, with all that being said, as thrilling and as interesting as I found this album to be, it's not without its flaws and shortcomings. For example, not every track here is complemented with a beat that is as versatile and dynamic as the one on the opener. Tracks like "Shoot atU" as well as "redMoon" kind of fly by without much of anything memorable to speak of. The feature on "In her Jaw" that I mentioned earlier is one of the weakest moments on the album, handily.

And given how extremity is this project selling point and how many of its best highlights are defined by that characteristic, some songs do feel like, here and there, they don't go far enough. Though I still could see a song like that being possibly a gateway into 2slimey's music for some people. But yeah, overall, I did have fun listening to this album and found a surprising amount of highlights vocally and instrumentally. The project ended relatively strong as well with cuts like "oMg", which sound like my speakers are melting when I put it on. Yeah, those crinkly high range frequencies feel like I am having tinfoil shoved in my eardrums.

But I can readily acknowledge that this project is absolutely, positively not going to be for everybody. And ultimately, I just found it very funny and very entertaining that this style of music is just accidentally becoming noise, which I think provides noise producers maybe with a very fun and possibly game-changing opportunity here. I'll leave them to figure it out, though.

But yeah, I'm feeling a light to decent vibe on this album.

Anthony Fantano, 2slimey, Forever.