Generally, a glimpse of your reflection in a mirror can really feel as disorienting as a dolly zoom, a jarring flash of presence that pulls you right into a darkish nook of your self. Mavi experiences a number of such moments of revelation on Shadowbox, his howling, heart-rending third album. Every look sends him spinning off his axis, frantically flailing till he can snag a bit of floor. “I’m So Drained” opens with one among these realizations: “As we speak my grandmother flip 80/And I’m on three Percocets, I ain’t even ate but.” Mavi holds his personal gaze as if it’s Persephone beckoning seductively from the underside of the abyss. Synth bass and splashy cymbals cascade round him like a collapsing ceiling, reverb threatening to engulf his pleas for absolution.
Mavi’s music can virtually really feel voyeuristic, as if we’re watching his mind exercise from behind a two-way mirror. The Charlotte emcee churns in existential circles, pondering towering ideas just like the battle between destiny and free will, or whether or not identification is innate or constructed. That is painful work; he was solely 21 when he launched Finish of the Earth, and he’d already concluded that existence is struggling—you both wallow otherwise you press on. Regardless of its glowing golden-hour grooves, 2022’s Laughing So Laborious, it Hurts was awash in self-doubt, Mavi’s joints aching from attempting to maintain stability.
On Shadowbox, the darkness that licked on the edges of his earlier work has almost overtaken him. As Laughing So Laborious, it Hurts propelled him to a brand new degree of stardom, Mavi skilled a spell of non-public issues; the substances he hoped would ease his thoughts dulled his inventive drive and aggravated his despair. When he emerged, he began writing unflinchingly about how exhausting it’s to untangle a psychological well being disaster. References to medication and drink abound; grief and heartache permeate each verse. He stays involved with most of the identical evergreen philosophical questions, however he’s much less positive there are any solutions to be discovered.
Fortunately, Shadowbox by no means buckles beneath the burden of its overcast themes. It’s as creative as any Mavi venture, close to virtuosic in execution. Regardless of the narcotic cloud surrounding the album’s creation, Mavi’s writing is extra spectacular than ever: wealthy with imagery and metaphor and full of spiraling inside rhymes, however nonetheless piercing and direct. Probably the most unsparing passages hit like a fist, like when he says, “I used to be taking drugs whereas mother was making dinner” on “Tether,” or how he admits, on “Grindstone,” “I declare I’m quitting, it’s been too many tomorrows.” A water motif exhibits up all through the primary half of the document, typically providing salvation via baptism or cleaning, different occasions promising to envelop Mavi utterly.
