Perhaps the most challenging way to approach rap is by doing so head-on. Choose your adjective: spoon-fed, meditative, therapy-session hip-hop. It’s the kind of music made where there’s no room to hide. There’s no interpretation. It’s not impressionistic. It’s realism through street poetry’s modern lens, and for that, artists like Huntsville, Alabama’s Sincere Hunte boast an aesthetic blooming with courage. Breathing his thoughts into existence, speaking his mind into the microphone, the result is as clear as day, and today is a good one for fans of those artists who, too, nurse their listeners directly with clarity edging towards a more conversational spoken word. Think Earl Sweatshirt or Mavi, and find your way back to SO FAR SO GOOD effortlessly circling the innermost train of Sincere Hunte’s thoughts. Think back to a particularly 90’s mosaic of straightforward hip-hop wordsmithery, homemade mixtapes, burned CD’s, and pixelated videogames with impeccably curated soundtracks, and then make sense of how well his sound would fit submerged in that era.

 

But today brings with it a different musical sphere and a broader range of sounds, yet still SO FAR SO GOOD is inherently refreshing. Harping back not towards rap’s roots where larger-than-life emcees would ramble sans direction overtop scratchy beats, but towards a purer street cypher pillar of hip-hop where modern lyricism’s roots draw their rapping water, the consistency of Sincere Hunte’s unshakeable delivery will certainly make most of those listening reminisce, at least for a second, on another time. However, it is with an air of risk-taking experimentation that his at first retro reminiscent sound emerges in fact retrofuturistic. In a current era of trend-tracking SoundCloud, it’s nothing if not bold to channel another epoch into a modern moment, merging the two lanes into something new yet necessarily built on an established otherness.

 

Opening with a layering of minimalist samples – some in French, some in other languages, and some simply beats – a trait humbly and comfortably and sometimes vigorously carried through the entirety of the project – SO FAR SO GOOD exudes the kind of energy that would find itself adorned to a CD or cassette tape; soundtracking an early version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater; being spoken into life in front of the corner store. And on a cassette tape – at the beginning of 2022 is fittingly where the project finds itself finding the ears of anyone successfully scavenging hip-hop’s ever-dynamic underground.

 

18 seconds of looped samples lead straight into the forward delivery of Sincere Hunte on the tape’s titular opening track, mixing some straight braggadocio with clever wordplay as a hard-nosed invitation into his unique hip-hop soundscape. By the time FLAMINGO opens to a brassy vocal sample of its own name, quickly giving way to a gloomy beat that feels like rain hitting a window, a glimpse into how Sincere Hunte is able to navigate unique beats and emotions through the consistency of his deadpan flow pulls itself into focus. For its part, the project’s secondary song bleeds of a more downtrodden emotionality.

 

Taking most the time of the day just to tell myself I’ll be okay.

Issues caught that money can’t fix, and my first instinct to think with my dick.

Read the book then arson that bitch, packing up and leaving town with my shit.

I got issues that no money could fix. I got issues that no money could fix.

 

Downright sad, sure. But thoughtful, introspective, and probably relatable – especially to an inner angsty adolescent – of most of those listening, Sincere Hunte’s dark poetry through his static delivery prove in the despondent space of FLAMINGO that vibrancy and greyscale can exist simultaneously in rap, and leave no question as to why so many underground names across the stretch of a half-decade or so have explored the quotidian melancholy that used to be reserved for indie rock and screamo. Effortlessly here, Hunte exudes emotional waves without ever changing the tone of his voice.

 

And in that adherence to the structure of his sound exists something truly rare across the span tethering poetry to hip-hop: rhyme’s lack of necessity. Where artists with a more dynamic sound can bend words to the will of their Seuss-esque limerick, detailing their own tracks with the pleasing presence of rhyme, Sincere Hunte at countless times through SO FAR SO GOOD instead feels more like a poet blankly letting the power in his prose speak for itself. It’s spellbinding to get lost in a lack of rhyme in favor of the simplicity in the right words.

 

And again, on SO FAR SO GOOD’s third offering, BILLYNAR, the young Alabama lyricist displays the versatility of what shouldn’t be so fluid. Rarely sidestepping his bread-and-butter flow, he – through the navigation of a more fast-paced beat, with some clever production and a few vocally stretched lines, and by way of his affirmed ability to pen emotional directions into a track – brings to mind the horror shop experimental hip-hop of an artist Night Lovell.

 

For the duration of the project, stylistically triangulated by the variance of the first three tracks and always centered by the consistency of his timeless delivery, Sincere Hunte pulls together a dynamically unique continuation of rap’s most lyrically directed edge. Minimally jazz and sample-oriented beats, introspectively penned prose, and an adherence to the spoon-fed and deadpan amalgamate to make SO FAR SO GOOD a perfectly unpolished underground gem.