Originally written and posted on LeLab, our amazing partner site championing underground music, fashion, and art.
7xvethegenius (Love The Genius) is an artist who is unapologetically her own thing. She doesn’t fit any mould or model that has come before or any that will likely come after. She builds her own sound out of a soulful and incredibly poetic lyricism that is unrivalled both in it’s intrinsic schemes and emotive language.
If I had to compare 7xve to another artist the best comparison I can come up with would be to someone like Open Mike Eagle. Mixing slow BPM beats with slightly surreal sounds to create a rich tapestry and backdrop to spit atop of, 7xvethegenius does this effortlessly riding her flow valiantly into battle.
The 2020 album ‘Self 7xve’ is a great introduction to the sound. Tracks like Same Hustle and The Result don’t just sound great, they actively serve up wisdom, history, truth, and learning. The album as a whole works with a central narrative that weaves the collected songs together.
The album finishes coming full circle from the hustle and thrill at the start of the record with Finally and When You Get Home. By playing with the narrative of her life and presenting all sides of it 7xvethegenius offers up something much more rich and rewarding to the listener. When You Get Home like the album itself provides an ever evolving song with different flows and beats that build upon themselves into something better for its switches.
The debut album ‘7xve Is Love’ had a much more aggressive delivery and a much more rough and raw sound. This is where 7xve is able to really stretch her wings and show off her God-MC pedigree. Every line and scheme merges easily into the next, every song is riddled with multisyllabic flexing and straight up braggadocio and each one is a little bit better than the last.
The debut album has its softer side too with tracks like McCarthy Park but as a whole it is a bigger and badder sound, less about the subtlety and concept of the art.
Latest single Break Soul shows off a much different side to 7xve and it’s got me pretty excited. Gone is the softer edge of the ‘Self 7xve’ album, and breaking out from the shed skin comes this colossal bad beast of an MC drawing on the rawness of the first album and blending it with the intricate skill and sound of the second.
It’s got more confidence and a lot more aggression, but with this more raw sound 7xve is able to play around with the verbal linguistics that were hiding in the lyric sheet on previous outings. Sucking in frantically between lines you can hear how much blood and venom has been seeped into every rhyme, with the more classic flow you can better notice the accentuated lines which highlights how cleverly written 7xve’s verses are penned and thegenius part of the name suddenly starts making sense.
In just a few short years 7xve has already shown off the capability to write beautiful narratives with amazingly complex rhyme schemes and addictive hooks. She has played around the sound and continues to evolve with every outing. We can’t wait for what comes next.
Words by Matt Miles and written for LeLab.
Dope shxt !!!