Now is a good time to be a fan of something you’ve never heard before. It’s a good time to be open-minded to the inevitable evolution of not only your own musical palate, but of music at large. It’s a good time to be immersed in the new, the different, the creatively rich. It’s a good time to be POOR.

 

$avvy’s second album – his second project in two years on the heels of 2021’s Boys Wear Pearls – is an exploration of the boundlessness that exists in a sphere of modern artistry willing and open to source their inspirations from across the spectrum. With hip-hop at its core, $avvy’s POOR swirls with a collection of winding sounds and aesthetics that speak to the enigmatic nature, too, at the core of the artist’s own brash individualism. In that way, the project feels like a reflection of his own image, an homage to his own inventive flection.

 

'I like to feel like style, music, and everything is all a part of who I am, and I guess in a sense that's where the aesthetic comes from,’ the rapper, vocalist, songwriter, DJ, model, designer, and probably more than we could ever list without making this sentence anymore unbearably long told us while speaking on the breadth of his creative indulgences during October of last year. And it’s in that intertwined collection of creative passion – along with a long and entirely unpredictable list of artists that influence his sounds spanning The Police, Herbie Hancock, and Tyler the Creator – that exists an insightful glimpse into just how it is that POOR has come into existence. Unapologetic creative range makes $avvy a musical, fashionable, and social icon of burgeoning influence. POOR just happens to be an auditory amalgamate of where his confluences abound at the moment.

 

Like Boys Wear Pearls, there exists within the album a particular preference towards both indefinability and unpredictability. You never know what the next song will bring even with the context of what you’ve heard from $avvy – and really from any artists at all – before. ‘I wanted to make something for everyone. I wanted there to be a song on that project that even if you didn’t like the first two, you’d love the next four,’ he said about his 2021 debut. With his 2022 sophomore collection, and with more experiences and musical depth to source from, the same can be said here, albeit expanded into further stylistic experimentation, more ardent productive prowess, and an even deeper definition for his inescapable uniqueness.

 

Overtop a foundation of silky keystrokes pluming with their pop adherences for overdubbed echoes and repetitive harmony, the young rapper born in California, raised in Huntsville, Alabama, and an integral part of the explosiveness defining the current Nashville scene opens the album with CALL, trotting his effortless flow and push for vocal melody into a late 80’s pop realm that few rappers would be able to take on. But, $avvy isn’t most rappers. Rather, he’s just himself, having bled of that individualism from day one. And his sound – his sounds – project that identity through an auditory kaleidoscope with POOR emerging as proof, because right after the album’s opener, its second track, CRUCIAL once again exploits his lively range. A hard-hitting, anthemic hip-hop banger, it’s an exhibition of antithesis when tailing a smooth, silky CALL that disallows for stylistic congruency, and instead finds common thread in the ever-present deadpan flow and deep register of POOR’s protagonist and its trailblazing collection of beats. DUMBLONDE, JANSPORT – folding in the ubiquity of Houston’s baritone poet, Neeko Crowe – and GROWNMAN follow suit, again taking on a bass-riddled adherence for high-energy hip-hop living simultaneously with an effortless knack for a mellow, oft spoon-fed delivery – which at other times delves into new and more dynamic exploration of cadence for $AVVY.

 

Onwards from the most hard-hitting collection of tracks on the album, POOR continues to evolve. EGO, OUCH, and GO! see a progression to $avvy’s sound that we haven’t heard to this point in his still very young career. Hard to define, but easily defined by a continuous connection to playing with a new confidence in a vocal range that exists in defiance of his gravely rap delivery, the triad of tracks lean on the emotionality of a young artist taking risks to find new niches through which to maneuver and express. Of them, OUCH in particular – which feels as though it was produced in the same solar system as the intergalactic virulence of Monte Booker – puts $avvy’s ability to compound emotion and melody on center stage, and on equal footing with some of the most rangy hip-hop transcendentalists of our moment. See Smino, Tyler, and Saba in particular.

 

FINGERPRINTS – which folds in the flows of Mike Floss and Charity – sees $avvy again exploring his vocalism and pop adjacencies, but does so by piping through the track and its beat an inescapable homage to Pharrell’s sonic influence on the game. SHIA LABUSSDOWN builds on POOR’s 80’s synth pop identity to its furthest extent, allowing $avvy to seamlessly navigate his rap-to-sung spectrum to the tune of a hilarious hook that speaks particularly true to an artist bound by a near always silly demeanor.

 

And after its interlude, one more quartet of unique tracks, this time not tethered to one another by their stylistic confluence, but instead granting a listener vibrantly unique examples of who $avvy has proven himself to be since the start of the 40-minute album. STUPID/DUMB – a new age hip-hop anthem over an old-school videogame beat. WATCH MY STEP – another melodically emotive exhibition. TERIYAKI – a silky progression of verse that brings to mind more strongly than any other of POOR’s inclusions the sounds that defined Boys Wear Pearls. And CLOSE THE CURTAINS – a high-energy way to end it all true to $avvy’s vigor during concert.

 

POOR drips unavoidably of its stylistic wealth. A display of genre defiance that reaches far beyond the extents of $avvy’s hip-hop roots, it’s a message to a larger musical sphere that a new era of artistry – many of which call home to Nashville – continue to push the boundaries of what is expected. When it comes to the indefinable and unique – which are always those that most violently stir the pot of creative evolution – $avvy should be front of mind, and POOR – his dissertation on both invention and transcendence.