'I can't tell you what to expect my next song to sound like, but you can always count on me getting better.'

 

When Marques Martin spoke those words to us a couple months ago, we couldn’t have predicted just how true they’d be. But with Dance Songs, he’s here to prove his growth and explore a new direction. The single isn’t a dance song per say, but a melodically driven hip-hop exhibition brimming with a delicate lightheartedness about love interests misconceiving the artists they date and the music they make. And through its timid hilarity and relatable relationship antics, it also emerges a brash display of Marques Martin’s ability to merge so many different sounds into something all his own. The collected cool of it all is a curated balance between the realms of a melodic Atmosphere and a more modern Blue Scholars, while its lyrical ease is an art school rap of his own invention.

 

If those delineations seem wide-ranging, they should. The young rapper is an impossibly gifted mosaic built on myriad influence whose aesthetic continues to shatter every boundary set by each subsequent release. Keep an eye out for Marques Martin as he continues to explore his own transcendence and make a name for himself in the spectrum of post-genre grey area.