Russian rap’s superstar Scriptonite says that his new album 2004 was a surprise even to him. After the release of Ouroboros in 2017, the artist announced that he had decided to leave rap behind, admitting that he had nothing more to say in the genre. He focussed on Gruppa Skryptonite, a new project for experiments with Latin rhythms, dance sounds and acoustic instruments, as well as on producing music for artists from his label Musica36. He tells Apple Music about 2004, “I started working on this album a little over a year ago. I had no intention of making a rap album, but new tracks would keep coming to me, somehow quite effortlessly.” “There are 24 tracks on the album, but only 16 of them are ‘proper’ songs. The rest are bridges or musical greetings from my friends. It’s the first album I’ve composed entirely on my own — musically; although most of what you hear on my previous records was also mine. There’s no overarching idea or narrative here, no single song that would be a key to the whole, but it sounds solid and, for me personally, it is very special. Probably because I used analogue synths and drum machines to make it all, the resulting sound is so warm, so 2000s. It’s my first album that I can listen to in the background without necessarily thinking that it’s mine.” Scriptonite, who broke into the Russian music industry out of the blue in 2013, wasn’t born in Russia but in a township in the suburbs of Pavlodar, an industrial town in Kazakhstan. American hip-hop appeared in his life through the cassettes that he listened to on his father’s player (originally a car stereo that was repurposed) — the family couldn’t afford a regular stereo. Adil Zhalelov [the artist’s birth name] started making music at the age of 15 and soon became one of the many ghostwriters selling their beats on the internet for a few dollars. The best beats he saved for himself though; and in the search for his style, besides making music, he continued to write lyrics, only sharing his tracks with a few people close to him. His big moment came in 2013. “You wanted real trap, this is trap!” — in his first hit “VBVVCTND”, he raps about poverty and the dangers on Pavlodar’s streets, set to bass blasts and unsettling bells ringing. Following a battle among A&R agents, the up-and-coming star was signed to Gazgolder, the most reputable rap label in Moscow. His debut album Dom s normalniymy yavleniyamy [House with Normal Phenomena] had the effect of a bombshell in 2015. Those who had expected that the artist would continue to create bold trap bangers found themselves surprised. In the release, Adil distilled several years of his Pavlodar life into a story with crime and romance — good enough to turn into a movie — and narrated it to the original soundtrack of smoky hip-hop, mellow blues and raw soul. Dom s normalniymy yavleniyamy impressed both critics and rap fans and became that year’s number one album on iTunes Russia. Scriptonite continues to amaze with every new album. In the spring of 2017, he released Prazdnik na ulitse 36 [Holiday on Street 36], an album full of provocative party hits, and only six months later — the two-part album Ouroboros, in which his simultaneously destitute and hopeful youth, spent in the streets, is contrasted with the loneliness brought on by his success. In between the albums, there were collaborations with British trip hop artist Tricky and EDM dancehall superheroes Major Lazer. But one thing stays unchanged: the artist and producer is always in search of new sounds for his music.