The Chicago indie rapper Defcee has been making music for 15 years, and he hasn’t exactly taken time off. Defcee is a prolific force; last last year, for instance, he teamed with producer Messiah Musik for the album Trapdoor, which came out on Armand Hammer member billy woods’ Backwoodz Studioz label. Today, Defcee has gotten together with another producer for another collaborative album, and it’s a good one.
Defcee, who works as a teacher in Chicago, recorded the new LP For All Debts Public And Private with BoatHouse, a Chicago-born producer who’d worked with artists like Kweku Collins and Lucki. The two of them have made an album of lyrics-first rap music with deep head-nod production. These days, a lot of underground rap producers are twisting ’90s boom-bap into impressionistic shapes, but that’s not really what BoatHouse does. Instead, BoatHouse keeps the hard-snap drums and swaggering insistence of boom-bap while bringing in a whole lot of atmospheric touches. Defcee locks right into that groove with authority. The raps on For All Debts Public And Private are as smart and elusive as you’d expect from a guy who came to rap through poetry, and it features appearances from Armand Hammer, Kipp Stone, Mother Nature, and others.
In a press release, Defcee says:
BoatHouse has been one of my favorite producers for nearly a decade. It was an honor to collaborate with him on a project with stakes as high as this one. It’s because I knew how bright the spotlight would be here that I decided to showcase every chamber of my rapping and songwriting, from the abstract pockets to the punchline-heavy, intricate rhyme schemes I used to make my name in the city. The title of the album is a thesis statement about the intention of the music I made on this album — to address what I owe to the scene, to those I love, and to those who have believed in me for the 15 years I’ve been making and releasing music.
Stream For All Debts Public And Private below.
For All Debts Public And Private is out now on Closed Sessions.
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