Hi everyone, Horsethony Playtano here, the internet's sweatiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Matt Proxy album, Trojan Horse.

At just 19 years old, Minnesota native Matt Proxy is making a name for himself as an experimental rapper with this debut album. The 'Proxy' in his name, from what I understand, comes from a VPN that I guess he used to essentially gain the means to accesse the ability to record and produce music on his own at a very young age. And he's been building momentum up until this point with some initial EPs, and the standalone 10-minute song, "Teenage Genius 3."

And the loyal following he gained off that material is now riding very hard for this new record here, whose tracklist reflects the broad taste Matt has had since a young age, as he was raised on a lot of different artists, from A$AP Rocky to Danny Brown, apparently Neutral Milk hotel, Panda Bear, and some Death Grips, too. And he's also gone on record saying that growing up in Minneapolis in the 2010s shaped how he sees the world and a lot of what he writes about, whether it be tragically losing his sister to an overdose, or even back in February where he confirmed that his dad was taken into ICE custody and deported.

And in addition to all of that, Matt is now navigating his blossoming fame as a teenager. And in a way, the crazy genre hops and aesthetic shifts across this project reflect the chaos in life Matt is experiencing currently.

And from the opening track, it's pretty clear Matt is making some moves in the music industry given that it does come with a fakemink feature. And he provides a very warped but catchy chorus on the track, crooning his way through all these really fuzzy autotuned vocal leads. Meanwhile, the song itself is a combination of homespun hip-hop and the sounds of the kind of online lo-fi indie revolution of the late 2000s. Like, I could see some of the guitar parts here landing on an old Wavves album. But even with this track being pretty rough around the edges and having a sort of slacker veneer to it, it's an incredibly catchy track with a lot of sweet and thoughtful bars about love, personal values, as well as capital punishment, too.

But then, when the track finishes, the record does a hard shift into a totally different vibe with the track "STARS," which kind of features several different song ideas segueing into each other very aggressively, never quite settling in one single place. It kicks off with what maybe sounds like a piece of trap metal, just very loud, aggressively produced hip-hop, but you can kinda barely make out much of anything that's going on because it is oversaturated and compressed and distorted in a way that is very much in line with a lot of new rage productions — think artists like 2Slimey or OsamaSon — but somehow even more distorted than what they are doing. Like, there's not really much coming through in the mix on this one outside of, like, a lot of buzzing, a lot of crackling, and Matt occasionally, in the gaps between all that noise, going "Bitch!"

Eventually, this all settles down into some dreamy keys and soul chops, some cartoony and gruff rap verses that read like very early Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future, of course those legendary "Uh-huh, honey" Brenda Lee samples that Ye used in "Bound 2," which is one of many overt Ye nods across this record. Again, there's a lot of interesting ideas and concepts strewn about this track, but they're too fragmented to culminate in anything all that impactful. Which, honestly, as we dig deeper into the record, kind of becomes a recurring theme.

Like the track "ATLANTA," which I can sense on some level is a tribute to Matt's dad, and also a call-out of this racist country that deported him. Many of Matt's flows feel deeply indebted to the likes of Earl, JPEGMAFIA, Tyler again. But sadly, every idea on this track gets broken down prematurely before it gets the chance to unfurl into something substantial. And when Matt does gain some focus, it's really only for a short time, like with the 1-minute track "ALL YOU'LL HEAR IS MY SONG IN YOUR HEAD," which I do think it's really cool hearing his dejected delivery against these quaint, bittersweet guitar arpeggios and sweet distant vocal leads too– I just wish it lasted longer.

It's not until the track "MISERY" that we have another track that kind of stops me in my tracks. Granted, there is a massive beat switch in the midst of the song's four-minute runtime, but at least the whole song scratches a somewhat similar itch from end to end. Matt delivering these low-key raw flows against blown-out soul chops and guitars, with more musical vibes that feel lifted directly from "Bound 2," as well as just Ye in general with all of these super anthemic, epic, autotuned vocal harmony passages.

The track "New Solution" I also enjoy, and is relatively focused as well, though it does kinda feel like a weirder take on something Ye would've done during the Yeezus era, with these hurried, loose flows over some grimy industrial beats. But I think the record from here begins to lose cohesion again, as subsequent tracks feel less like songs and more like random moments and off-kilter sonic experiments.

The song "BLUE," for example, feels like if you had a dancehall DJ dropping lo-fi raps and indie folk Bandcamp singles onto the dance floor. The whole thing has an okay start, but eventually it does devolve into all these cacophonous guitar leads and stuttering vocal sample drops. Very unlikely combinations of fragments, for sure, but, again, not culminating into anything all that memorable or exciting. The track "NEVER KILL YOURSELF," which is a collaboration with the never goodbye project — this is a kind of random track that mostly kind of feels like a one-minute-long underscores demo, like from the fishmonger era. It's okay.

Meanwhile, "MEANT2B" kind of brings more collages of disparate ideas. And in a way, I feel like a song like this, at this point in the tracklist, does kind of highlight the difference between experimenting, making genuinely experimental music, and not really following through on an idea. Because if any number of the sounds on this track, or in this half of the album, were more well mixed, or actually developed further than the very short periods of time that they last, would these tracks be considered all that experimental? Probably not.

And that's not to say there's no merit to Matt's ideas musically in and of themselves. I just don't see what's so experimental about them outside of them having a kind of noisy, lo-fi veneer and just being generally unfinished.

The final moments on the record are more or less the same outside of the closer, which I do think is an impressive finish to the record. Like, not only does this track feature some of the most personal, determined, self-affirming bars on the entire record, really kind of leaving things off on a very positive and aspirational note. I also love the way this track kind of busts into this grandiose, lo-fi, heavy, alt-rock guitar finale that feels almost like a combination of a Mount Eerie album and Weezer too.

Look, overall I think there's a lot of great ideas on this record. There's most definitely a 'there' there, but I would hope into the future Matt finds more ways to kind of build his songs out — or at least come up with some more fluid and thoughtful ways of kind of segueing between all of these fragmented moments. Which is why I'm feeling a light to decent 6 on this album.

Anthony Fantano, Matt Proxy, forever.