Chilleano Releases “That Shit”

There’s no preparing yourself for the ton of bricks that come swinging out of the shadows shortly after hitting the play button on Chilleano’s “That Shit;” in this track, the percussion that emits the main beat is an instant mood-setter and easily the most potent instrumental element in the mix. The keys that hang over the lyrics in a fashion reminiscent of “Notorious Thugs”? Muted by the bassline. The bass itself? Entirely shaped by the steady framing of the streamlined drums. Chilleano has the center of the master mix all to himself, and in the midst of the pulsating storm of sonic textures that come closing in around him, he manages to somehow deliver what could be one of the more evenhanded rap performances of September. 

The first time that I sat down with this track to review it, I was enamored by the execution on our lead vocalist’s part. There’s a precision to his verses that really had me wondering whether or not he was utilizing some sort of modulation behind the board, but after slowing everything down and isolating the individual parts in the song, it was more than obvious this wasn’t the case. Chilleano maximizes the tension in what was already a highly pressurized environment in “That Shit” by cutting into the beat with as fierce a vocal as he can muster from within the restrictive walls of a recording studio, and while I wasn’t expecting to hear as much from a purely indie source, he winds up sounding a lot heavier than anything I’ve caught on Rap Caviar lately. 

Smooth basslines can make or break a single stylized with as much of a wallop as this one was, and though what we hear in “That Shit” is perhaps a little more excessive than it actually needed to be, I think the bass tones that spill over into the vocal and percussive parts go a long way towards humanizing the lyrics. There’s a special DIY edginess that comes from inviting a little bit of dirtiness into an otherwise sterilized composition, and for the arrangement of instrumentation that Chilleano ultimately decided to go with in this single, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a more efficient way of achieving the same effect he did with this scheme. 

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/That-Shit-Explicit/dp/B08DKY8PFX

A gut-puncher with a sense of melodic heart I neither anticipated nor knew what to make of (at first), “That Shit” indeed feels like the start of an amazing career still very much in the making for Chilleano. Nonetheless, I would be lying if I said the rhythm and rhyme in this single didn’t make me curious to hear what he’s going to be coming up with in the future, specifically as it relates to crossover trap music and the atmospheric tones he manipulates in this track. He’s got a lot of elements within his sound that still need to be exploited, and on the back of his current momentum, I believe we’re going to see even more quality material out of his studio sessions in 2020 than we already have. 

Michael Rand