Quebonafide — Romantic Psycho

Quebonafide blesses 2020 with some pop rap. I state that I have no idea who he is, so, for those who come here in my own condition, I summarize his career: born in 1991 in Ciechanów, he made his debut in the rap game at 22 y/o with the collaborative album "Płyta roku" (with Eripe) and made his solo debut two years later.

His "Ezoteryka" is platinum and first in Poland, followed by a compilation ("Hip-Hop 2.0", gold certified) and his second solo album, "Egzotyka", a diamond-record in which stands out the featuring of the legend KRS-One. In 2018, he joins the rapper Taco Hemingway to form the Taconafide and their collaborative album, charted #1, another diamond disk that's awarded to the Polish Grammys as hip hop album of the year. With these assumptions, we arrive at 2020, the year in which Kuba Grabowski releases his third solo album.

The rapper maintains the template of the previous albums that gave him glory: confirms Taco as a guest, he sets up many female sticky-pop hooks (including those of Natalia Szroeder, his current partner: unfortunately, the girl is better as rapper than as singer and I don't know if it's really positive, but I hope that the problem is due to the rhythms and to the mood of the album more than anything else), and he puts an infinite series of guests that leave him little space for solo (two poor cuts) and that for me, as a layman, they're indistinguishable, these guys personally have no distinctive trait in their delivery.

For a foreign listener, this type of language isn't very easy to deal with, but his performance and his attitude help and his concept, however, isn't too different from that of his colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic: the record starts from a session with the therapist, which acts as a thematic background to the entire project. Like Joyner Lucas' "ADHD". In fact, it's not too dissimilar from that album: this is also much less reflective than you want to make you believe the introduction and the topic that should be the main one, is practically never even touched. It presents the typical themes that you would expect from a pop rap album by an artist you don't know (drugs, girls, rap), and it's mainly linked, in an almost manic way, to the braggadocio: Quebonafide spits these bars with a flowing delivery, bored and decent, and with different solutions and styles, almost always functional to the chosen rhythms. Musically, I have nothing to say: the production is simple and sparse, based mainly on light trap or jazzy rhythms, with midtempo shots and some interesting variations such as the jazzy EDM dope rhythm of "Bubbletea" (decent the sticky pop hook of Daria Zawiałow).

However, overall, like "ADHD", this effort is mediocre and bad: it's a boring product that points to pop rap that has given him so many diamonds (and this is destined to quickly become his third diamond), but trivially. it doesn't look at Poland, it look to the whole continent with an eye of hope towards the States: here are so many international cultural references "easy for foreign listeners" that after a while you start wondering if this is really Polish rap or a kind of European/international-style rap music, I mean, if I wanted to make an album in an attempt to attract as many young European audiences as possible, I would have made exactly this record. Not essential. 4.5/10.