On Repeat: Syrup By Tkay Maidza Is The Devilish Club Anthem We Need Right Now
Tristan Young @talltristan
Tkay Maidza does not care if we cannot go to the clubs right now- she’s got a banger for us anyway. The Zimbabwean by way of Australia singer’s new single Syrup is, as the name slyly suggests, oozing with black light atmospherics and hedonistic intrigue. From the onset Syrup is striking for a bass line so distorted it could have come from Mr Oizo’s hellish cauldron of perversions. The way she revs up those acerbic pulses lets it perform double duty as a rhythm section in a really intuitive way while also stressing the acuity of its intrinsic tension. With each confident thud the bass sheds so much granular decay and static fuzz that its visceral dissolve seems imminent. However the snapping crackle of percussion props up the beast of a low end creating a colourful if sinister texture of sound and movement. Maidza has a licentious charm to her throughout, seemingly conveying her sentiments through a spoken word kind of delivery, but with more of a syncopated momentum, even if she obviates the need for specific notation. “I just wanna be rich, thick, sick, sweet- syrup”, she chants with a focused tension, the figurative word play succinctly justifying the rationale behind her anointed sobriquet. Maidza’s burrowing and icy passion mixed with the corroded grime of the beat, textually and literally, recalls some unholy combination of Lil Kim and SHYGIRL, and that’s about as exciting as something can sound to a people sealed within the hermetic confines of pandemic life. The hype lines get only slightly more ludicrous but her dead pan loquaciousness sells them in a really fun way, highlighted by, “shift the paradigm with the pentagon rhymes/ I’m the optimus prime, it’s prime on time”. Any verse that can reference the military industrial complex along side Transformers without a hint of irony has something going for it truly. An entrant stream of subtly modulating synth on the final offering of the chorus injects a healthy dose of surrealism into the mix. Boarding just on the precipice with the melody tweaking into flat notes through the synth pads suggests a sense of stylistic derangement. Like the stunning bass, It’s another element of Syrup that takes the tonal elements of an entropic breakdown, an experience we can all relate to by now, and repurposes them towards something more than just exhilarating, but affirming. Syrup is, for all of its seedy indulgences, something of a mental health break.