Image via Sarafina The Great/Instagram
Harley Geffner still wants to know what they even do in the Met Gala.
Skrilla’s got to cool off at some point, right? He’s been on a year-plus long heater, writing some of the darkest, wildest, and weirdest raps from one of the worst places in the country (Kensington, PA), and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. “Shirt Off” slides a little further from his weirdest, so he can show off some straight-ahead raps. He’s as close as he gets to“on-beat,” here, hitting more traditional flows to emphasize that he’s the hottest out – in any lane.
Just because he’s rapping a little more straightforward doesn’t mean his wordplay takes a hit. He still rips off some off-kilter bars like, “I got munyon, get ya dunyon, for a funyon, that’s a fact.” He’s passing his gun to his girl in the car when they get pulled over. He’s going hard in the paint like Waka Flocka or Blake Griffin. He’s still burning rubber in the striker (a stolen car with the VIN changed), and putting his shooters against his enemies’ shooters like a warlord. And the crazy part? It’s genuinely catchy, and not just cool to listen to as a spectacle.
Listening to Banditdamack rap is like sitting in the back of a friend’s car while they excitedly recount crazy stories. Every word is deliberate and packs a punch – every few bars, a different story. The rapper from Hemet, CA is one of the best new rappers out of the West Coast, and it’s due as much to his delivery as it is the content in the stories. It’s slightly reminiscent of Remble when he first came out, but it’s a little smoother, and the stories are a bit punchier.
On “Vamanos,” we’re right with him as he realizes someone is coming around his area trying to set trip (i.e. bang on him). He sets up a challenge. Alright, if you’re trying to act like that, then you bring your best blick, I’ll bring mine, and let’s meet in the “Vicious,” which is presumably the name of an area in Hemet.
A few bars later, we’re with him in the therapist’s office. His therapist said he needs more therapy. Next bar, we’re with him as he stops by an enemy’s mother’s house. We’re flicking up right outside to make the threat implicit. He gets the message, and now he’s scared to leave his own home. As POW correspondent Diego Tapia wrote in his interview with Banditdamack, this is the “stark reality of life lived in survival mode.”
There are no words that can do justice to what Rio’s been on since he came home, but POW columnist Donny Morrison came the closest, when he said Rio’s been rapping like a man possessed. Instead of trying to wax poetic about it, here’s a list of my favorite bars from his two most recent videos.
“Cracked the supercharger up, I just scared granny / 50 racks each pocket, why my pants saggy”
“I made 100k this week, I let my son have it / put the gun behind my back and start shooting, how I run backwards”
“I got 3 million stashed, fuck a bank / but when you take it out the wrapper it gon’ fuckin’ stank (yeah, smell like mildew)”
“When your car goes 200 yeah it’s hard to stop it”
“Yo bum ass should have played for Flint Tropics”
“You can’t get over on me, I done tricked trickers”
“Burnt a hole in my jeans but they just clothes / oh you was tryna pull up to the store, bro they just closed”
“I made 40 in the club, but I left 10 / shoot the opp 5 times ‘cause his head big”
“I was born big, but I’ll die larger”
“Stop talkin’ while I’m rappin’ lemme focus please / you just now got on trish? That shit old to me”
“Lemme hold your heat.. I ain’t gon’ take it / the halfway house around the corner, bro I might not make it”
“That girl had a pretty face but I ain’t like her ankles”
Sarafina The Great, from Côte d’Ivoire, slips between rapping in French and English, skating all over rhythms derived from coupé décalé, a traditional Ivorian style of music and dance. If you want to go down a sick rabbit hole on coupé décalé, start here and then go here. It’s super percussive, and the dance is defined by sharp, shifty, and repetitive movements. Much of it leans into bright, pop-adjacent sounds too. You may recognize some of those hip movements from modern club rap out of Philly and Jersey. It literally translates to “cheat and run away,” as the genre was borne out of a movement of refugees leaving the Ivory Coast to settle in France and other parts of Western Europe. Getting to France was seen as a sign of success amidst enormous socio-political turmoil in the early 2000s, so getting money and getting out was the goal, hence, to cheat and run away.
From this context, the music and dance that would come to define the popular music of the country was born – it was essentially flexer music. The OG stuff is dope, but Sarafina brings a rush of modernity to the music, bending the rhythms into modern rap cadences, blasting in with raps about going “ghost in the G5,” and scamming for Dior watches. She pays homage to the forebearers, referencing classic coupé décalé songs in her raps, alongside raps that would stack up next to some of the best scam rappers of the 2020s. Her flows click together unconventionally, circling around a pocket before shimmering their ways in. There’s something truly entrancing about it.
We have a new contender for hardest beat, and possibly the hardest song, of 2025. On “JUST DO IT,” producer haram samples a Lebanese song that strikes deep to the core of the human experience. In the youtube comments for the sampled song, Le Beirut by Fairuz, one commenter noted, beautifully, “this song captures the sorrow us Lebanese people feel across the different generations. A sorrow that continues to be nurtured by decades of war. Many of us displaced across the world and oceans apart from our families, the war has robbed us from what Lebanon could have been—the Pearl of the Middle East. The diaspora has stolen the memories we could have shared with our families while living on the idyllic and mountainous eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea 🇱🇧.” This commenter should write for POW.
The sample is, obviously, incredible, but the beat takes on a whole new life with the way that Paxslim rolls with it. The 22-year-old, Swiss, by way of Nigeria, rapper brings an unassuming swagger to the track, turning it into a rallying cry for anyone trying to get off. The raps are fairly standard and simple, but there’s that “it” factor I can’t quite put my finger on that elevates the whole listening experience. There’s a fun bar about Akon, a reference to Drain Gang, and other silly quips, but to hear his flow over the revving beat as he chants, “just chase your dreams and go, go, go, go,” is where you feel his sauce lifting you up.
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