Gangrene are here to crack brains like they were blown speakers. So says Oh No near the top of his fourth collaborative album with the Alchemist, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. The Oh No–produced highlight “Oxnard Water Torture” slides in on a bed of drums, cymbals, and haunted-house organs, a hazy backdrop he runs into the gutter. “This ain’t your Moët, this Olde English,” he says with a Joker-like snarl, his verse all harsh dissonance and razor edges. Alchemist follows up with more nimble flows and surreal writing: He’s the android with a sniper scope, hopping out the reclining Recaro seat at pinball velocity. Back together for the first time since 2015’s You Disgust Me, this dueling-stoner-dragons approach is a perfect distillation of the mud-caked shit talk the duo inaugurated with 2009’s “Acts of Violence.” Heads I Win oozes with menace when it taps into this frequency, but nearly as often, it loses some of that grime, coming off a touch too clean for its own good.
Prolific doesn’t begin to do justice to this pair’s respective catalogs—last year, they dropped nearly a dozen projects combined. As Alchemist has parlayed his indie-rap mini empire into placements on Travis Scott and Drake albums, Oh No has churned out wonky psychedelia with underground stalwarts like Elzhi and Tha God Fahim. Gangrene remains the space for them to get their hands dirty, trading sludge balls with the laidback giddiness of a true-school weed cipher. Everybody needs an outlet for low-stakes fun, and at its best, Heads I Win plays their still-developing contrasts against each other well. On “Cloud Surfing” and “Just Doing Art,” Alchemist’s fixation on surreal elegance—all Lamborghini races and smearing enemies’ blood on canvases—slots decently with Oh No’s blunt threats and metaphors (“Y’all ain’t solid, just some snakes sittin’ low-low/They will find you on the side of the wall like plate sticker logos”). They still sound like they enjoy rapping about rapping together, even when they’re worlds apart.
But when I press play on a Gangrene song, I expect not just grimy beats, but grimy beats that sound tailor-made for the duo. Several tracks on Heads I Win are missing the distinct Gangrene rawness, and it’s not a welcome change. Sometimes they’re a little too silly, like the Saturday morning orchestra sample at the center of “Dinosaur Jr.” or the chintzy interpolation of the Inspector Gadget theme song on “Watch Out.” Others sound like leftovers from non-Gangrene Alchemist projects: “The Gates of Hell” has the same kind of maudlin loop heard on his This Thing of Ours projects; “Just Doing Art” and closer “Muffler Lung” sound like they were pulled from the Bo Jackson and Haram folders, respectively. That isn’t to say these beats are bad, just that they don’t fit the project’s ethos. Stacked next to “Espionage” and “Magic Dust,” which do scratch that itch, they illustrate how Alc’s prodigious output is beginning to blend together.
Aside from “Watch Out,” Oh No largely sidesteps this problem. In front of the mic and behind the boards, the Oxnard, California, native routinely supplies Heads I Win its filthiest moments. On opener “Congratulations, You Lose,” his slinky keyboards and farting synth line inspire him to use his enemies’ beards as Swiffer mops. Here and over the skipping drumline and sour horns of “You Should Join the Army,” he sounds vicious and hungry. Even when the beats get a bit homogenous, Alchemist and Oh No’s verbal chemistry is still airtight. Hearing them flex just for fun while playing vocal double-dutch over peppy drums on “Royal Hand” is as engrossing as early career highlights like “Gutter Water” and “Flame Throwers.” It’s one of the few times on this album when the vintage Gangrene sound feels forward-thinking, too.