Mhm, Mhm - Customs (2026)

Waking dream-like, avant-ambient rap & blooz from a striking new artist who first pinged radars on Klein’s Parkwuud Ents. label in ’23 and now lands on her long dormant ijn inc, sharing much in common with her free blends of classical, concrète, gospel, and textured sampledelia. A real doozy tipped FFO Lil B, Klein, Space Afrika, Honour.

‘Customs’ professes the inner life of US artist Mhm, Mhm at a syrupy slow speed-of-thought, rendered with an illusive, vaporous ambiguity within his richly amorphous arrangements. Specifically speaking to concerns on “the preservation of spirit under the conditions of American life”, and contemplating how it “is pictured, broadcast, and sonically constructed”, it shapes up as a fascinating play of metaphoric symbology where classic hallmarks of Black music tradition - the blues’ call-and-response; soul catharsis; sample-based innovation - are naturally filtered thru a modernist lens. In effect his vision calibrates with an illustrious cohort of dare-to-dare, contemporary Black artists who are keenly in the process of smudging distinctions between old and new worlds.

Patently one of the most distinctive additions to a modern timeline that arguably began with the liberated ambient rap of The Based God, Lil B’s ‘Rain In England in 2010, and spans Klein and Space Afrika in the mid 2020’s, ‘Customs’ tells a timeless story with a fresh voice. His fine-wrought backdrops of neo-classical keys with subbass detonations, or screwed starbursts of kosmiche pads with distorted Linda Sharrock-like gusto, or spoken word set to brine-bathed, experimental ambient chamber music, ideally bring the narration to life; suspending disbelief for the duration with a canny short-circuiting of cinematic, avant-classical and rap conventions.

We can only imagine its transitory qualities work just as well on the move, on headphones, as it does in our office listening bubble. Although slow, nothing sits still in ‘Custom’, conjuring a dreamy sense of motion in passage from the cut-up concrète college of an opening couplet calling to mind Klein via Waynephoenix, before giving up the glorious, heart-in-mouth feels of ‘unreleased - (contactless)’ & sweeping strings redolent of Space Afrika’s quiet storm style on ‘unreleased - (austerity)’. The queered, screwed rap edit mutations of Rabit come to mind on ‘youareeverthingyousayyouare’, while ‘unreleased - (soldja)’ is the LP’s most upfront, almost-pop piece, and his talent for lush, tongue-tip classical string frisson helps beautifully wrap it up in the swells of ‘unreleased - (enough)’.