LJ Lewis loads Smoking Gun with boom-bap grit and punk-adjacent swing

LJ Lewis’ Smoking Gun arrives on 13 June from Wyandanch, New York, with five short tracks and a self-described purpose: fly music you can ride to or vibe to. The album tags sit across boom bap rap, experimental, hip-hop, punk and soul hip-hop, which gives the project a useful edge. This is not indie rock, but it is absolutely part of the independent music ecosystem: small-scale, direct, self-released and personality-led. Track titles like Burning the wick from both ends, Rolling Stone and Sam Cooke is turning in his grave suggest a writer interested in pressure, reference and the friction between old soul memory and modern survival. The strongest independent hip-hop often works exactly there, where the beat carries both swagger and exhaustion. Smoking Gun sounds compact, rough around the edges and ready to move.

Source: https://ljlewis.bandcamp.com/album/smoking-gun