21 Savage, Offset & Metro Boomin - Without Warning
Written by Nathan Evans
Design by Nathan Evans
Additional Editing by Dylan Walsh
No rapper today best exemplifies Halloween like Atlanta’s 21 Savage. A modern-day Lord Infamous, he recently dropped the highly-anticipated sequel to his breakout mixtape Savage Mode, produced by fellow Atlantan Metro Boomin. Savage Mode II is a great slasher album which builds on its predecessor with a swarm of vicious highlights such as ‘Slidin’, ‘Runnin’ and ‘RIP Luv’, as well as the shockingly mellow ‘Rich N***a Shit’. Nonetheless, it’s their triple-threat mixtape with Migos rapper Offset that still comes crawling back into rotation when the end of the 10th month rears its head.
Collaborative mixtapes came back into fashion in a big way in 2017 and 18. Future and Young Thug; Big Sean and Metro Boomin; Travis Scott and Quavo; new album releases were looking more like the lineups for UFC Fight Nights, as every rapper wanted to go head-to-head with another titan. All these synergies resulted in huge first-week numbers, but, with a lack of larger purpose or deep synergy, they struggled to leave a lasting impact. Yet Without Warning, fittingly unleashed with little notice on Hallow’s Eve 2017, and with its absolute and enticing theming, not only lived beyond the trend, but is now a Halloween staple for any hip-hop fan. Harnessing the supreme ghoulishness of the trap lifestyle, 21, Metro and Offset each instill a fear factor into trap music that hadn’t yet been fully realised.
Today’s hip-hop (the majority of it affectionately labelled as ‘mumble rap’) has been crucified by many for its perceived lack of lyricism, failing to see that the focus has switched to relentless flows and large personas. These rappers embody characters like never before, and the way this 34-minute excursion is able to find the festering evil in 21 and Offset’s mafioso personas is truly chilling. The similarities between the two are literary, rapping about excess, violence and the truths of their environment, yet how they sink their tendrils into every beat is poles apart, to the point of them being complimentary. ‘Still Serving’, a sluggish and morbid dirge, best demonstrates how much the pair bounce off one another, with 21 setting the pace with a bloodthirsty, dead-inside delivery, before Offset’s darting, breakneck rhythms inverts the track completely.
Across the runtime, the references to horror are stacked - the shrieks of chainsaws, werewolves and guns are all in store - and the vocal delivery can call to mind some horror icons, too. The reincarnation of Jason Voorhees that is 21 Savage brings the perfect amount of apathy as he spits in a matter-of-fact drawl: “I’m gangbanging, and I’m dangerous”. 21 is the lead antagonist on the project, his commanding cadence sets the tone of the pack chasing him - careful not to be left behind and devoured by the horde. ‘Run Up the Racks’, one of two solo Savage tracks, latches onto that vampiric mentality, with extreme focus on securing comically large bags of money and removing anyone who poses threat to that, spawned from the dog-eat-dog environment of street and capital warfare. Naturally, there are nods to the festering social situation he faced before the fame, explicitly stating he’s “from the gutter” on the hook of ‘Rap Saved Me’. It always lingers in the back of the mind when listening, and his persona is that of a scum dweller, a depraved lowlife that has been let off the chain. “My Choppa Hate N****s”, whose striking title symbolises that psychotic wrath, features a morphed, demented flute sample, and the sort of cold chill that flashes in a suspenseful movie soundtrack, filling the listener with trepidation. 21 toe-tags the beat with an venomous flow, as the cut bleeds seamlessly into one of Offset’s lone tracks, ‘Nightmare’.
As if entering a wicked tomb, the red glow of the full-bodied synthesizers takes over and leads you down a sinister path, as Offset encloses you into his lair, his sharp, full-force ad-libs circling around you like a ritualistic circle of hooded figures. Hiding in the shadows and leaving scratches on the walls of this gore-soaked construction, he fills your head with devious thoughts of wealth and grandeur in the verses, before petrifying with the most memorable hookline on the entire project, “Freddie Kruger, give em a nightmare / Soon as you close your eyes, n***a, we right there”.
The Migos member was certainly the most cold-blooded of his group, but he had never been seen in such an outwardly frightening context, and it makes perfect sense for him to be here. His machine-like flows are like the Terminator, heightened by his unshakable stoicism. The record’s big single, ‘Ric Flair Drip’, is an eldritch mutation of the conventional Migos formula - its skeletal setup only needed icy keys, copious amounts of bass hits and Offset’s samurai-like swordsmanship to craft a sub-zero dazzler. Adding to this image is the ambiguity of Offset’s character compared to 21; his origins aren’t disclosed, and we never get to know how he came to be, how he became out of control, only that he’s “top of the food chain”. Metro Boomin always takes out audible breaths in between bars in aid of his ultra-polished sound, but here, the breathlessness of particularly Offset lends a monstrousness to his slick-talk, the trait of a killer whose remorse goes as soon as the bullet enters the chamber.
Underpinning all this is Metro Boomin’s beat cauldron, a portent of doom that fully realises the striking image on the front cover, a maniacal Dobermann on collision course to maul its enemy. His bloody handprints are all over the project’s direction, placing exactly what is needed in the right place, and abducting any dead weight. This is evidenced by the lack of feature-geddon that so many hip-hop albums rest their laurels on, only finding room for Travis Scott and Quavo, whose short verse on ‘Rap Saved Me’ is enough for any of his foes to turn tail and flee.
Young Metro has been summoned as hip-hop’s John Carpenter all too many times, but the comparisons are legitimate when looking at some of the instrumentation he wields here. The quick, menacing melodies that start up many tracks (including an ominous music box vamp on ‘Nightmare’) are clearly indebted to the original Halloween soundtracks, and the trembling, Theremin-like synth on ‘Mad Stalkers’ digs up a host of classic horror pictures. Metro’s beats are so rich, and the snares he uses are so interesting, productions like ‘Ghostface Killers’, ‘My Choppa Hate N***s’ and ‘Still Serving’ innovate past trap’s tried-and-tested snaps. Yet, the most sinister productions here are those in which he seems to sample ambience (‘Rap Saved Me’, ‘Disrespectful’, ‘Mad Stalkers’) and render it intangible. Reaching out to grab it will only see you swashing dust, but with menacing chords still creep up on you, lurking on your shoulder like a raven.
The scene for these 10-tracks begins with the occult bells of ‘Ghostface Killers’, and the way the bass and Offset both come in is tantalizing and raunchy. It’s a misty, M-rated fantasy effortlessly positioning 21, Offset and Travis Scott as card-carrying Godfathers. Haunted with ad-libs, the three trade endless quotables (“I got an over-overload, look like I just sold my soul”; or the simply iconic “Kim Jong, yeah, big bombs”), cementing one of the most intoxicating entrances in hip-hop history, and setting up the thrill ride to come.
‘Darth Vader’ rises like the red sky past the branches, a lead-out back into the real world after traversing this pitch-dark soundscape. Without Warning is a gruesome, swirling carnival of malevolent pleasure; let it fill your senses with gut-wrenching torments of excitement and paranoia as you’ve never felt before. And you’ll come back to it again and again. They always come back.