nueen
Swerved
3XL
The Balearic Islands aren’t typically associated with feelings of existential dread, but nueen—a native Mallorcan who’s based in Barcelona—makes music that’s dripping with angst and apprehension. Drinking heavily from the wells of lean-addled Southern rap, woozy grime and gritty UK drill, he’s gradually settled into a kind of psychedelic greyscale, outfitting his low-end-heavy beat excursions with blurred textures, ominous rumbles and twitchy sound design.
Following up on his criminally underrated 2024 collaborative LP with Iceboy Violet, You Said You’d Hold My Hand Through the Fire, and this year’s even more slept-on xnd—a joint effort with Defled that was recommended by First Floor—Swerved is nueen’s most elaborate release to date. More importantly though, it’s an effort in which rather than sampling anonymous MCs (or manipulating his own voice to sound like one), he’s linked up with a myriad of established artists, securing vocal guest spots from the likes of Loraine James, Xzavier Stone, Dawuna and RenzNiro. (Space Afrika, who’ve long supported his work, also lent their production skills to two tracks on the record.) Where nueen could once be regarded as merely a fan of the predominantly Black genres and scenes in which those figures operate, he now sounds like an actual participant, making Swerved feel less like a blazed Bandcamp drop and more like a statement of intent from a producer who’s ready to move beyond the bedroom.
On the foggy standout “Searchtiers,” that move is powered by the same sort of bulbous bass tones that populated early grime, while the meditative “Impls” puts a fresher spin on the genre, layering RenzNiro’s confident flow atop the song’s darting basslines and percolating percussion. (The Manchester rapper also sounds great on “Sitgo,” a bleary-eyed cut that borrows from the trap canon.) Elsewhere, “Shm”—one of the aforementioned Space Afrika collabs—dips into sultry R&B, with Dawuna doing his best D’Angelo impression, but “Atmosphere” might be an even better late-night cut, carving out an ambient-not-ambient zone in which Loraine James seductively talk-sings alongside jagged blasts of guitar that wouldn’t be out of place on a Korn record.
Though much of Swerved has a decidedly British flavor, nueen does reunite with old friend and fellow Mallorcan Defled on “Impasse I,” a gloomy instrumental that buries its scuttling undulations in a humid—some might even say Mediterranean—haze. He then goes it alone on “Copicat,” a restlessly stuttering tune that sounds a bit like an old clicks-and-cuts record being played at double speed. nueen thrives in this kind of agitated murk, but on LP closer “I Guess”—the album’s other Space Afrika collaboration—he takes an unexpected turn toward the light, folding in some stirring string passages and ethereal vocal choirs. The song itself is barely more than two minutes in length, but it’s a welcome sign that nueen still has a little bit of beauty in his toolkit.