Pink Siifu and 454 Are Reimagining the Statement Rap Album

As culture continues to barrel ahead at the speed of snippets, it always feels like the very idea of an album is on the chopping block—especially in rap. Depending on whom you ask, rap albums went out of style when record labels exclusively began chasing one-hit wonders and ringtone sales in the 2000s, or over the last decade or so, when listening habits leaned toward playlisting and social media-friendly soundbites. Yet the desire to make—and to hear—a full-length holistic artistic statement endures.

Superstars with grand ambitions and carefully manicured rollouts get the most eyes, but the underground and indie spaces are also flush with artists intent on keeping that attention-span-expanding spirit alive. Two recent examples, Pink Siifu’s Black’!Antique and 454’s Casts of a Dreamer, are both capital-A Albums overflowing with vision, personality, and quality music. Since the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy era, major statement rap albums have favored blow-out spectacle and obsessive curation, like they’re aspiring to be the next prestige TV show or superhero movie ready to be binged and forgotten about in a few weeks. The long runtimes of the Siifu and 454 records run counter to that impulse, giving the artists space to be messy, contradictory, and experimental. Each one is intimidatingly long by streaming standards: Dreamer boasts 29 songs, though many of them run less than a couple of minutes; Black’!Antique has 19 tracks, with several stretching past the six-minute mark. But anyone can make a long-ass album. What really pushes these into a special light is what they do with all that sprawl.