‘I wanted to create an album where people can dance to real shit,’ PG County Maryland’s IDK said about his new EP, Simple. Not to be mistaken by its title, the work – at only eight songs and coming in at under 20 minutes – is a complexly interwoven series of explorations melding hip-hop, soul, funk, and electronic production through the immersive world of IDK’s deep-thinking penmanship and charismatic delivery. Named not for the definition of its title, but instead for the Benning Terrace neighborhood in DC – nicknamed Simple City because, as IDK puts it, ‘you can get killed for any simple reason’ – the tape’s complexities fit more into place. But still, the project doesn’t have a sound one might expect from such a dark root. Instead, Simple is tantalizingly groove-stricken, drawing on its production and the always vivacious, oft-unpredictable delivery of IDK for a sound that brings light into the darkness – that breathes life and honesty into the narrative void placarded onto Benning Terrace and other underrepresented neighborhoods like it.

 

‘I wanted to tell the story of Simple City in a way it’s never been told before. From drug abuse to crime and murder, I wanted to cover what it feels like to be from Simple City and teach the world that the fix to helping disadvantaged Black communities isn’t as simple as you think,’ IDK continued after explaining that Simple City has more to offer. Being the birthplace of legends like Marvin Gaye, and overflowing with an abundance of Black promise including creatives like himself, IDK seems to have taken the route of infusing important conversation about his home neighborhood into music that is undeniably positive, uplifting, and downright danceable – perhaps opening that conversation further, and making his roots and the roots of so many others feel like more than simply a negative beginning to a positive story. ‘The most important thing for me is I’m an example of success for a lot of people. Even when I feel like I have more work to do, there’s a lot of people who would die to be in the position that I’m in.’

 

Produced top-to-bottom by the unparalleled, genre defying Kaytranada, Simple captures the complexity of IDK’s neighborhood upbringing by way of the deceptive charm in music that is simply damn good and emotionally transporting. Beginning to end, it’s vibrant, groovy, and unendingly danceable at its surface and through to the core of its productive and sampled composition. Beginning to end, it’s deep diving, layered, and contextually immersive to the heart of IDK’s pen. Through it all, it feels much longer than it really is, much further into the future than a hip-hop even now still all too often trend-bound. But IDK is experimental. So is Kaytranada. And together, they project the composite bounds of Simple into the spectrum of modern music.

 

Thematically, Simple’s roots draw water from its furthest depths. Hyper detailed by way of IDK’s immense linguistic grip and quickfire flow, the album – stripped of its beats, and maybe of the flection in IDK’s seemingly always smirking delivery – would read as he speaks, a story of drug abuse, crime, and murder. But in equal parts, it would also bleed of love, lust, struggles with fame, and family. And that juxtaposition is all part of the larger picture – that amongst all of the struggles the world sees when the media depicts a neighborhood like Simple City, there is still the day-to-day life and normalcy that define the people and the community at large.

 

It’s a juxtaposition explored beyond the thematic discourse of Simple, too. Even beyond the juxtaposition of Kaytranada’s playful beats underneath the hard-nosed raps, IDK himself shines as more musically vulnerable than he ever has before. The always experimental rapper takes more risks – and finds more success doing so – through the album’s central two tracks in particular, Zaza Tree and Breathe. Melodically focused, both songs bring a sung direction for IDK onto center stage, melding Simple at its seam, and putting on exhibition a range that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent from a broad swatch of DMV musicians, along with those from London. Take a listen to anything from any era of GoldLink – especially his 2021 HARAM – and you’re sure to hear a similarity in the way that both artists transcend the rapped and the sung overtop beats born from an electronic pulse through traditional hip-hop production.

 

There’s something in the water, and that’s a good thing. There are brash complexities in the Simple, and that makes it one of the most experimentally wide-ranging hip-hop projects in recent memory.