BEST NEW TRACKS: DARCI - ON MY OWN

Darci broadcasts from the edge of night on "On My Own!"

There's a little bit of a disconnect when you hear mainstream rappers talk about isolation, loneliness, disconnection. Sure, we know rappers are people too. We're sure Future has his share of problems. We're sure Young Thug has things that keep him up all night (and we're not talking about substances.) Heck, Drake sounds like he's transmitting from Superman's Fortress Of Solitude, even when he's popping bottles at the club.

This isolation and depression seems a little disingenuous coming from Drizzy, however. Either that or he truly has lost perspective from his days working at Rite-Aid. How isolated and lonely can you be when 65% of the women on Earth are in love with you (and probably a lot of the guys too)?

And yet, we have an eternal hunger for isolated transmissions from the depths of the night, those long dark hours when you can't sleep. We need beats and rhymes that speaks to those moments when you're thinking about every nanosecond of your life, pondering every misstep, probably trying to drown the pain with drugs and alcohol. We need these dark side beats because these moments are real and a lot of us struggle with this turmoil on the daily.

Hip-hop works best when it speaks for real people - telling universal truths with the language of the street corners, speaking prophecies and poetry beneath sizzling halogen lights. It's one of the reasons hip-hop is one of the most vital musical forms of the 21st Century. It speaks for the marginalized, the dispossessed, pulling no punches with its subwoofer shredding existentialism.

Darci is the newest neon light in nocturnal hip-hop. "On My Own" is the anonymous duo's tenth single, to date. The temperature rises with each subsequent release. Boiling point should soon be reached and we don't doubt we'll hear a lot more about this mysterious unit, probably before year's end. "On My Own" sounds like alley crawling at 3 a.m., maybe looking for a score, a hit, a distraction. Darci's diatribes have a heartbroken ominousness to them, creepy-crawling over leaden, deadened beats and scintillating trap beats, sizzling like a wall of shuriken.

DARCI - ON MY OWN

Darci mine a similar mood to future R&B miserablist James Blake or the slightly mad, misanthropic, drug-addled rhymes of Spaceghostpurrp. Darci are already starting to play huge music festivals, like SIS Alive in Des Moines, Iowa later this summer. They're not going to be anonymous much longer. Better get on it now before they get famous and happy. We Are: The Guard are looking out for you!

J. Simpson occupies the intersection between criticism, creativity, and academia. Based out of Portland, Or., he is the author of Forestpunk, an online journal/brand studying the traces of horror, supernatural, and the occult through music, fashion and culture. He plays in the dreamfolk band Meta-Pinnacle with his partner Lily H. Valentine, with whom he also co-founded Bitstar Productions, a visual arts collective focused on elevating Pop Culture to High Art.