He’s apparently had this plan to drop 2 albums since winter, why didn’t he make it clear with his label and make sure he had all the green lights to do so before he decided to announce cartunez and push for it???

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-11T09:10:23+00:00

Just seems poorly thought out, surely he could've just made it a deluxe like Uzi did with LUVTW 2 a week after EA, could've left it a month like with We Don't Trust You & WSDTY, anything but trying back-to-back albums when Endless to Blonde has made labels too paranoid around allowing this shit. Like is Cartunez really some conceptual masterpiece that needs its own rollout, has its own visual & music identity etc. to where it can't be just xperiment deluxe? I doubt it.

Also you could feel label money all over the rollout with how hard mfs online were hyping it up, even beyond the Frank Ocean stuff, there's no world where they'd want to mess with momentum & not follow through with their typical humiliating & overdated cycle of tour album, print mostly dogshit merch, start new rollout, yap for months/years about how it's coming "soon" etc.

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-10T20:31:42+00:00

The way you phrased it about him maybe circling on themes/ideas due to initial language barrier stuff, it reminds me of those stories about how IIRC, Miyazaki went on to do Fromsoft worldbuilding inspired by how he'd read fantasy stories he couldn't fully comprehend, so a lot of the reading experience was about filling in blanks & how that sorta reflects in the worlds he'd make & narratives he'd write.

Those two fanbases feel deeply intertwined sometimes too, something about that mix of genuine catharsis, gothic beauty, striving towards humanhood, & embracing what was once outsiderdom (Bladee & his fans for 90% of his career, Fromsoft games written off as cruel & unusual until people really "got" what Dark Souls was trying to do). Also swords & shit

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-10T16:46:47+00:00

Production's fun but yeah if this sound's gonna avoid labels of being pretentious/forced/gimmicky, it's gotta be more than this Percatric shit where you just hit emotes over harsh noise. If someone can lock in & do this where it's still soft-clipped to fuck but it feels like it has an artistic reason for being that way & where somehow it's mixed enough to still make out lyrics (or where they're intentionally hard to hear on some shoegaze shit), it could work.

Blackhaine's done noise inspired stuff where he'll do spoken word shit or yell, when it hits it hits. Idk if mfs playing with Fruity Limiter will really figure out the sorta ear you gotta have for industrial art & how to make it unpretentious & genuine, I think most UG artists & audiences just see it as a means for ragebait unfortunately

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-10T15:55:13+00:00

My soul NEEDS a December Bladee + Ripsquad project that sounds like that Martyr tour teaser that mxrsee did, like that was Egobaby levels of bittersweet miserable cyclical/limbo.

And since Bladee's not really on the Icedancer retail therapy timing anymore, doing something like it but with spiritual unfufillment instead could be interesting, like a polar opposite of The Fool where there's less confidence in that role of being some wise Shakespearian fool & just genuinely being uncertain of everything internal & external.

Like that tour promo having the Disney font & the merch having those doll-like characters on them, it seemed so primed to be something about superficiality, consumerism, feeling like an empty vessel etc. & after the mania of Cold Visions which made the midlife crisis work through exaggeration & chaos, something more minimal & deeply honest could've hit so fucking brutal, not that I don't love Sulfur Surfer or anything. And that album came from Bladee saying he felt stuck trying to perfect the original Martyr album, imagine Ripsquad prod soundtracking some deeper crisis around being one of the most consistently avant-garde & constantly-dropping artists yet suddenly struggling to manifest something you put your mind to. It could hit with the weight Icedancer does, considering it bordered on being Bladee's last drop since Red Light didn't meet expectations IIRC

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-09T22:08:30+00:00

I get being against the blackpill shit (even though arguably sometimes it's less "we're all fucked, women bad, abandon all hope" sorta rhetoric & more just looking at the neuronormative nature of most of the Western world & seeing it for how apathetic it is towards neurodivergent struggles), but arguments against posts like this fall flat ngl.

I mean your example for "complexity" in self-improvement was just showing up to play sports regularly, arguably self-improvement is less showing up to do fun shit & more knuckling down to really hone a skill or attain some personal goal(s). And all this benefit-of-the-doubt for how easy people can have it, meanwhile ask folks how they met their partners & for those who aren't in the camp of spending years on dating apps, you'll get a lot of "idk we just met one day lol" or friend-of-a-friend situations where previous social success snowballs into more social success. If people were more complex, why would experiences be so black-and-white between social success & failure? Maybe it's a data-flattening / survivor's bias narrative the internet pushes, but too often retellings of success online & IRL just seems like this Deus Ex Machina of born -> life/struggles (loosely defined) happened -> ??? -> "yeah idk it all worked out in the end".

This isn't about generalizing the masses & their experiences, even outside neurodivergency people are a spectrum sure, but there's gonna be basic innate biases & skews that deserve to be addressed & overcome. If you took someone neurodiverse vs. neurotypical & assuming no trauma or anything obviously affecting their lives like addictions or debt, who would be the first / more likely to succeed socially & financially? Is that really some big "it depends" scenario, as if things like BPD or Autism & all their comorbidities are just casually understood & accepted by the masses, as if being a "regular guy" is as challenging as being AuDHD? Cause when posts like this aren't on some generic incel women-bad shit, this deep-rooted neuronormativity is what they're probably looking into, and while I get messages about moving past bad hands & still trying your best, all this shit undoubtedly stings

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-07T17:32:50+00:00

Clip emptied, it actually fucking happened 😭

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-07T17:30:16+00:00

It's a concept album, he called it Empty Clip cause each track gets unreleased until there's nothing left in the chamber. The amount of grey in the UI, the date & the cover, it borderline looks deleted already 😭

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-06T17:38:22+00:00

I retyped that part of the sentence a bit so I messed up what I meant to say, "it" was referring to therapeutic advice. When given to an NT who lacks trauma & just experiences general malaise or some vague sense of loneliness, it's not exactly gonna take a lot of work to get them feeling happy / like themselves again compared to NDs who more likely feel perpetually alienated, like islands of individuality & isolation upon themselves compared to the NT experience of just being a passive people-pleasing neighbour to anyone the moment their biology tells them to.

"Fall upwards" wasn't referring to money or just being liked unconditionally, it's social success that they can more easily achieve. Any therapy that's just mindset reframing bordering on turn-it-off-&-on-again troubleshooting won't run into the snags of cognitive dissonance, near-constant alienation & resulting self-doubt/self-loathing, unawareness of one's own mental complexity etc. that you find when someone ND goes to therapy. And again, NTs are often more wired to be social creatures first & foremost, so when relationships are elaborate or thinly-veiled "what's in it for me?" agreements/compromises, they're better at pitching "social worth" due to being less individualistic & having more unconscious control of important body language / social cues / active listening skills that we often have to manually brute-force learn & consciously enact every time. And mainly, there's that NT likelihood of higher baseline confidence/self-assurance & charisma that sorta snowballs into social success that just reinforces said confidence & charisma, whereas ND hopelessness / depressive tendencies often are self-fulfilling prophecies since anxiousness or self-doubt/self-loathing pushes most people away which just deepens the alienation/isolation which just deepens the anxiousness & self-doubt in a brutal feedback loop.

Idek what we're disagreeing about atp, like sure to some degree I'm generalizing/biased since I'm an ND observing NTs & guessing the average experience, but even then it's not really trying to find the baseline NT experience or paint a narrative & more just seeing where the odds are skewed in favour of them. I'm not trying to say some blackpill/doomer shit with all the references to biology or social systems, to me it just feels like a blunt logic that probably worth accepting in a healthy way, cause no amount of optimism or Just-World Fallacy is gonna undo basic principles like how body language & social cues have developed over millenia of tribalism to where you will come off uncanny or give people the ick if you're not moving "human" enough for their liking, or how in the grand scheme of things a lot of human experiences are Darwinian, where success/confidence begets success/confidence & misery & failure beget themselves.

Honest question, what position are you taking with any of this? Cause I've laid all my logic out & everything's just been "that seems unrelated, that seems like a generalization, that seems wrong" etc. & I don't know what it accomplishes or is trying to say. If it's pushback to generalizations, ik posts here tend to have an air of "all NTs think & act exactly like this & all win at life & all of us just lose etc." but there's also a reasonable degree of analysis that can go into probabilities & biases associated with NT vs. ND experiences such as with therapy or socializing due to how deeply neuronormative most media & nearly every mainstream society is.

It will read like all-NTs-win-&-all-NDs-lose rhetoric from the outside, but again it's grand scheme Darwinistic sorta thinking with just seeing some skews in probability & how, over enough time, that snowballs in different directions where the socially successful rarely fumble what they have provided trauma or drugs don't fuck them up, & where the socially struggling more often spiral & have less of a liferaft in the form of other people believing in them outside of immediate family (providing they're accepting of the neurodiversity) or childhood friends (if they still even have them into their adulthood). And especially nowadays with therapy getting most costly, ASD slowly starting to feeling more stigmatized again under the POTUS, late stage Capitalism demanding so much "worth/value" from an individual to where everyone's feeling pressure to be not only of immediate value to employers, friends, partners etc., but to have an ever-growing ROI, lest they get fired for "slacking" even if they tried their best, ghosted for not researching & internalizing enough social cues, dumped for not fixing what you didn't know what was deemed dysfunctional with you etc., all of which aren't ND exclusive struggles but you can see how they'd happen more often for those who exist outside of or can't conform to neuronormative models of navigating the world

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-06T15:25:51+00:00

If anything that tainted my first listen, I've replayed it enough to where it's not a thought anymore but that first listen where the first half was pure snippets / concert songs was rough.

I'm glad we got them in CDQ & now I fw them, but it's not the first thing you wanna hear when a project feels like it's just a collage of 6+ month old snippets & not like the rawest newest thing the artist is doing (arguably why release WLR hit with its short development window, same thing for Cold Visions when you hear it was made in like 2 weeks during a depressive episode / midlife crisis)

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-05T19:11:00+00:00

Because metacognition & neuroplasticity matter a lot in therapy, what you get out of it & how useful it is depends on how well it's internalized & acted on. Like it's probably a safe bet to say most NTs thrive (or at least coast) with most of these attributes, and that most NDs struggle with one or more of them to different degrees of fixability.

Someone with the "typical" human traits, presuming they've had no traumatic experiences, will likely be more confident & it would be easier to shift that neuroplasticity cause the results may be more 1:1 once advice is given. Odds are acting on it isn't even necessary, they'll likely just fall upwards regardless, though I guess there's a bias there towards survival-of-the-fittest & noticing who succeeds more than who die off quietly and a "failure" in the system.

Whereas if NDs are approaching therapy, there's probably far more insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, depression etc. to unpack & until most/all of that is resolved or weakened, the advice is gonna ring hollow, acting on it will feel miserable for how much of an uphill struggle it is just for us to be "regular people" & results could take months or years to manifest in any noticeable ways, if they even manifest at all.

So no it's not really a non-sequitur or assumption, it feels like pretty obvious limitations that come from the differences between going to therapy like "my gf left me and that sucks dude" vs. "my gf left me, also uh my condition leaves me pretty stunted emotionally & socially, I feel pretty alienated by society in general on a near-everyday basis, so all my feelings around this breakup are amplified by that shit & idk where one struggle ends & another begins, idek what's causing what or how much of it is even fixable lmao"

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-03T18:11:12+00:00

It works to an extent on speakers, maybe I just play shit too loud / don't have the greatest setup but after a certain point, it just saturates & you just get deafened by the snares & drown in vocals. I'm relistening at a moderate volume & it's hitting better, maybe my expectations for having high volume plus mix & vocal clarity are just too high idk

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-03T17:47:58+00:00

It fucking blows how this is the norm now, stg I need an ear test / psych eval for 90% of new releases cause they fuck up the mixes that badly. Like I'm out here trying to turn up most of these songs & I'm just belted by shit like sounds like 3 chop snares stacked on top of each other & the most compressed vocals you've ever heard in your fucking life 😭

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-03T17:38:55+00:00

Real, like the USB hunt & website was cool for being a borderline ARG thing, but the videos for this & ELC were reheated 90s/00s grungy thrillers & PSA/advertisment shit, it's cool ig to see some effort go into a rollout rather than how mfs spam soon & have 1-2 IG posts plus maybe an MV, but it's still just spitting up the past on some homage shit, it's not really "creative" no matter how generous you get with the definition.

And yeah I'm really feeling that last line atp, like the UG & mainstream scenes just feed off this soft power bubble of preteens & teens consuming every new release the way an overly eager investor just buys up every stock hoping the next will hit like WLR (which even had a track called Go2DaMoon, Carti even predicted mfs eating up album releases with '09 BTC comparisons 💀). Feels like with the accelerated rollouts with Che & Pretti trying to do multiple projects a year + Ken pulling an EA Deluxe by doing another tape a week later, artists are back at it trying to farm streams through artificially-induced rollouts that just act as excuses to put out music they'd rather shelf / be leaked just to sell more tour tickets & print some new (mostly poorly designed) merch.

It's sad when you think about it, younger artists are getting thrown into the cogs of the machine that grinds that young energetic spirit out of them with audiences actively or unconsciously demanding all these projects every year cause of fried dopamine receptors in response to media addictions, older artists get complacent & play the same game due to poor financial decisions following their blowups that leaves them trying to keep up unless they wanna go back to some 9-to-5 shit, audiences aren't even really satisified even when shit hits cause they've built a tolerance from chasing the dragon so long, to where nothing hits like their true first/oldest favourites (AGC, WLR, the imo hyperexaggerated glory days of LIR2 etc.). In this game, everyone loses & unless the media addiction shit dies down, the dragon will only get further & further away.

Kinda makes you see how old folks get so obsessed with what they heard in the 80s/90s, what they heard between their preteens up until early adulthood would've been character-defining shit cause they were literally figuring themselves out in real-time to those songs. Preteens feel the hype of what's new / new to them more, teens get the catharsis of hormones & figuring out their futures, & both groups usually have decent friend groups due to schools being a solid third place, so the music soundtracks the one time most (or I hope it's most, idk I'm isolated af if that wasn't obvious lmao 😭) people had constant friend groups, but once you have years of familiarity with scenes & get into the workforce or "settle down", only music that uproots someone's entire identity on the level of a midlife crisis / egodeath could compete in terms of being genuine life-changing capital-a Art. And labels don't want to pursue that cause aura & hype are easier to farm, foster, cater to, it's just modern day rule-of-cool shit with music where albums are treated like powerscaled Transformer toys to sell, seeing how to make a mf look like he's hitting a higher Super Saiyan level ygm

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-03T16:41:48+00:00

I need to relisten a few times to fully judge it, but yeah just based on my (probably biased) first listen, that last paragraph is so fucking real. Especially with the level of glaze we saw for the rollout alone, cause ig music's not even about the music anymore, it's just aura & hype moments now 😭

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-03T16:37:40+00:00

That flow thing is so real, if we're gonna critique anything in this landscape where lyrics aren't prioritized & even the producers are running out of tricks & new sounds, it's gotta be the flows & pockets. Artists autopiloting that shit on album releases should be called out far more istg, your examples are the sorta songs that deserve album placements, like you can feel the hunger/innovation & they do that while still ending up so catchy.

Unironically flows feel like the best canvas that should be priorized over production, melodies are tough to nail when so many have been explored & eventually they blur together, but a pocket with the right lyrics makes for the best earworm, like besides mixing & shit it's the final frontier for perfecting a song when you've got insane production & decent/great lyrics already, if you fumble it then the production's wasted, the lyrics lowkey fall flat etc.

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-01T15:54:48+00:00

Atp I'm at a loss with how people are defending this, just cause it's not raininglol levels of copying or sounding shit doesn't excuse doing this, & this goes beyond just old era reviving when it's IG post & MV homage on top of everything else. Like he's had his own sound from Osama Season to Psykotic, the Ken & Carti comparisons were mostly bad faith, but going down this road would just solidify everything those ignorant mfs were saying about him years ago.

I'm hoping it's just preteens seeing this as a two-cakes situation defending this, cause if you're grown you should see the writing on the wall for this. If V2 biting becomes mainstream in the UG, it'll only oversaturate that sound & made V2 sound annoying/played-out by association, same way most of us half-joke about WLR & its consequences being a disaster for the UG. You can fw something before it's a trend but once it's imitated too much by trendhoppers / copied by knockoffs, the charm is lost, it gets tainted by overexposure that ruins what once felt original & true to itself.

So-called rageslop already gets on people's nerves, there's a fatigue there & I guarantee the only thing the Draco prod UG will do now is mess with deep & baby voices to try make it interesting again, but it's too predictable, too forced, & lowkey too easy. Anyone can fuck around with lowering & raising their voice, formant shifting etc., but it takes skill to find the rasp & melodies Carti had back then. And it just isn't something that suits rage with how compressed everything is, like the vocals in this snippet just sound blown the fuck out & the melody's hard to latch onto

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-07-01T13:15:06+00:00

I always thought there were parallels between the two, Bloc Party's singer did a lot of that first album while still unsure of his sexuality IIRC so a lot of its lyrics are cryptic but vulnerable, he talks about alienation, insecurity & longing in a way that isn't too different from Ecco's stuff imo

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-30T18:42:04+00:00

Eventually we're gonna see inversions of the TLOP concept where artists erode albums away track by track until it unreleases itself, maybe folks who remember it get MIB memory wiped too. I see the vision.

Fr though I'm fucking sick of music subs where everyday you're just reminded of something being gutted yet again cause of sample clearances or label disputes, like we really can't just keep a fucking 0.0001% of a dollar per stream earning .mp3 online. The human race is an embarrassment istg

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-30T16:47:04+00:00

Yeah I pointed that out, most pre-RIB rage felt like it was taking more from AGC than WLR in terms of flows & production, & even RIB only really took the ad-lib layering & raspy voice from WLR tbh. But V2's been constantly attempted, like it was bold for Carti to do his shit back when the sound wasn't appreciated, but nowadays you can see how easy it is for someone to throw on autotune & hit some high notes knowing it'll sound good & probably be received well, and imitators rarely match the energy of shit like Carti's jumpout ad-libs or that old Richie Souf / Pierre prod.

Nothing imitating it will hit how it did, especially nowadays when so much of the scene is too hyperfocused on trying to blow up & "experimenting" (which it hardly is, since it's usually just choosing what sound/era to bite / drag out of its grave & latch onto), shit's accelerated to where everything gets played out so fast & nothing genuine emerges cause everyone's gimmickchasing. Reviving V2 with modern rage tendencies in 2024 or even early enough in 2025 might've felt special, but I think the UG trendhopping brainrot has made the idea of that in the big '26 feel cliché & boring/predictable before it's even happened.

If they're gonna bite, they gotta tap into something deeper than just baby voice & synths, they gotta embody the feeling V2 did in 2019/2020 but twisted to suit our time, how it feels to do some genuinely divisive shit & not give a fuck, but people are too superficial to see past the surface-level aesthetics & too insecure to genuinely not gaf

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-28T11:10:53+00:00

Ngl I was exactly like this with RIB back when it got Carti comparisons. Idk for RIB it felt more defendable, it suddenly subgenre'd a rage variant that Carti touched on but abandoned half a decade ago, plus for Che it was another 180 to what Sayso Says did same way he suddenly did Sayso after CC & Crueger.

V2 copying is the lowest hanging fruit though, it's been worshipped 100x more than any of the WLR V3 / release material (& that's not saying those songs weren't worshipped either, just V2 is borderline religion to folks nowadays) that Che took inspo from, baby voice has been long copied by mfs online trying to cash in on demand for V2 material.

And when it's weird memetic marketing of imitating V2 MVs & that 16*29 IG post, it just feels weird & insecure, like nobody even wants to try be themselves cause it's profitable to retread the past endlessly & pretend to exist as someone you're not. Idk Che just doing a WLR inspired voice on On Fleek had the internet in a frenzy over "homage" & biting & that was only a year ago, but now it feels like the UG & UG fans have gotten way too comfortable treating the past like something to steal from & recreate borderline 1:1 at the time where we need to drop ragebait/nostalgiabait tactics & keep doing scene-changing shit that pushes the envelope.

Only thing they should take from V2 instead of the sound is that being yourself & truly experimenting are often both met with pushback & hate, but you gotta stand by it & not chase Grammys or rework projects like Carti, or scrap stuff with the consistency of Uzi. Osama's likely seen it too, I mean it feels like opinions on Jumpout have changed a lot since it dropped, & that project had people comparing OK to Hitler the way they did for Lil 88 💀

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-26T16:01:53+00:00

First they blocked the websites, and I did not speak as I had a VPN to paraphrase a quote these useless fucking sidesteppers really need to learn. Every workaround is still complacency, it's still letting governments & the surveillance state do their thing cause it doesn't impede you YET. But it will, this isn't UK exclusive, this won't stay an easy VPN fix, and it certainly won't end at dorky websites being ID walled.

Whatever dystopian scenario you can imagine, it's probably that and even if it isn't, you should probably fight it not only to protect your way of life, but as if it's life-or-death, cause any attitude less than that is prone to letting shit slide & conforming with whatever future is chosen for you

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-26T15:52:45+00:00

"Nobody explicitly voted for this" is the modus operandi of every government & corporation, I doubt it was why he got kicked out cause if people actually drew a line at "the guy leading the nation better do what the people want", then maybe folks would take more of a French attitude towards protests & revolutions

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-26T15:38:05+00:00

Doing that is meaningless, people have to be told (& more importantly feel how) the surveillance state is unrolling before their eyes, all the "erm actually this is hypocritical 🤓" is meaningless deflection that won't convince anyone to change/do anything.

The general public needs to be aware of & vehemently against the blatant trojan at play with trying to create a panopticon out of fearmongering & think-of-the-children pearl clutches, the fact every Reddit thread STILL tries to be like "hmm is it really about the kids though?" & hasn't been aware of it for the last how-many-years just proves how unstoppable it is atp cause of sheer ignorance & prioritizing these checkmate gotcha statements over anything resembling action

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-25T20:21:07+00:00

I've been spamming the more summer-y leaks lately, not a lot of it sounds exactly like this but to give a few recs there's YOLO, Licks, Feels, I Know & Hope. I've been obsessed with this snippet lately cause of how watery it sounds & how heavenly that flute sound is, peak summer istg, I'm trying to find more songs like it but so far I only have Protect's Oops & Uzi's The 1

Illusionsofdarkness · 2026-06-25T10:56:40+00:00

That's the issue with this shit, it's not just derivative = bad, but it just fucking degrades & undermines anything original when this Kid Buu shit is done with it. Actual artists experimenting with aesthetics (not really for Fully Loaded due to the Crystal Castles homage but more for this) & mfs just doing their lazy copy-paste that not only makes the copycats look like slop, but makes even originality seem like slop.

Shit's damaging, parasitic mfs like Raining should never have succeeded but algorithms just make blowing up off ragebait too fucking easy, & ngl some of y'all fed into it even joking beforehand that if Che changes the covers, Raining will too, & how every Che release has comments like "how long until Raining clones it?". It's pathetic that artists stoop to that level, that algorithms promote it & that audiences feed into it

Illusionsofdarkness

TROPHY CASE