Ricky Hil

Seven months after dropping his debut album, Support Your Local Drug Dealer, Ricky Hil returns to the mixtape arena to educate fans on the ups and downs of drug use. Made in a dark, smoky studio in Southern California, SlickVILLE 2 is at once magnification and amplification. Imagine Hil performing surgery on his body of work; he dissects it, isolates a single vein and then proceeds, over the course of 18 tracks, to wring said vein until there's no feeling left. Working closely with friends Boo Bonic, Alfie Pink, Fat Trel, Dom Kennedy, Skitzo, R.E. Thuggz and the XO crew, Hil blends live instrumentation with programmed drums and various sound effects to create a wholly distinct sound. If you had to compare it to something, it's like Eminem's druggiest records, but magnified. If Hil occupied Dr. Dre's chair, he would zoom in on those ProTools files, lengthen them proportionately, elongate time and then force Em to slow down his rhymes to a syrupy crawl. Shut off from mainstream influence, Hil draws from a consistent, carefully curated lexicon to create his rhymes spontaneously; his voice contorts like pink bubble-gum to the geometry of the beat. "Eyes Roll Back," "I'm Off," "Just Wanna," "Pop Pills," "Weed I Love That" and "Rolling Stone" stand out, the latter for its amusing reinterpretation of the Rolling Stone's "I Got the Blues," the first example of harmonica used by a hip-hop artist ever.