Apple’s generally excellent write-up of this playlist notes that Metro’s production are “surreal, vaguely dystopian soundscapes” that sound a “thousand years ahead of his time.” It’s a good description of the sound, but his soupy, sludgy sounds always struck me as more retro-futuristic, a regression towards a vision of a sinister pre-millennial tension rather than the glittering, bleached oppression that currently dominates our assumptions about what lies in front of us. Regardless, few producer/singer teams have been as successful at developing an instantly recognizable (and wildly successful) aesthetic as Future and Metro Boomin, and this playlist collects the best of them. This is pretty essential for understanding where hip-hop music was in the mid-’10s.
