Lost Kingz

Editors’ Notes Tha God Fahim hasn’t been shy about meeting the marketplace: Since starting to put music out in the mid-2010s, he’s barely let a month go by without releasing something, whether collaborative, instrumental, as producer, MC, or both. The generosity is candid: He can be hard, he can be gentle, he can be gleefully ignorant and mystically contemplative. (For an introduction to all sides at once, check out the 2017 compilation Dump Goat.) Lost Kingz leans toward the more thoughtful side of his output, an exercise in dusty, loop-based boom-bap that serves hard lessons with the weathered temperance of a dude in no real hurry. (Were his assumed lineage not clear here, he closes things out with a track called “Cash Rulez”; sample lyric: “It’s pay me now/Or pay me now.”) Not that Fahim is full throwback; if anything, the heat in his music is how he manages to balance the conservative and experimental, a quality most evident on two features with regular collaborator Mach-Hommy, “Blade Fordge” and “Play Ground Legend.”