Thomas Tsuruda makes more than albums that have starts, middles, and finishes, he makes a cohesive flow that transforms itself into a story. This tradition is continued with Internet Slaps Volume 2, his 5th full length studio release. To try to use conventional genre-tags to describe this album would be doing it a great disservice, as fitting in a box is exactly what this work aims not to do. Tsuruda’s style ranges vastly from minimalist approaches to complex soundscapes. He incorporates lo-fi hip-hop, trap, freeform bass, and some sounds that are even hard to compare. Some albums feel like an artist took a feeling and ran with it, with that same emotion brewing at the bottom of every individual piece, but this album is more like a day in the life. It has ups, downs, highs, lows, sections that make you want to punch a wall, and portions that make you want to lay in a field basking in sunlight. Even his heaviest tracks have very calm beginnings and ends, almost like a storm passing through.
The album opens with ‘Crow,’ a perfect fit as the first page in this 20 page story. It gives off feelings of a new beginning, the start of something big that you can effectively dip your toes into. Next, ‘TFW You Stand on the DJ Table (The Final Chapter)’ unleashes Tsuruda’s powerful side, beginning with a huge half-time drop that continues getting more trappy as it continues. Elements are added and subtracted on the fly, adding new levels of engagement. ‘I’m Still Here’ comes next, which features one of my current favorite openings to a song. I absolutely love the middle-eastern vibe of the intro, which gives it so much personality. This is definitely a song that you could get rowdy too.
Something prevalent throughout the entirety of the album are constant switch-ups so the beat never becomes stale and the listener’s ears never quite know what to expect, in the best way possible. This doesn’t happen from song to song, but even on a smaller-scale; where each section of a song has the possibility of being vastly different from its other pieces. ‘Apples’, ‘Devil Man’, and ‘DC Boiz’ are great examples of this as they all have parts that almost seem completely foreign when compared back to themselves. ‘Apples’ incorporates outstanding lo-fi hip hop at the beginning into a much more energetic trap ending, and ‘Devil Man’ uses a Japanese rapper’s vocals over the top of a fantastic beat which is very refreshing as it seems most vocals used as samples are in English nowadays. ‘Ode to Losco’ is just as it’s named, incorporating the Dutch trap masterminds’ insane amounts of low-end that will push any speaker system to its limit. ‘Bricks’ has very warm, welcoming vibes, while ‘Skeletons,’ the song that chases it in order, is exceedingly dark and can slap the listener into a land of confusion.
Internet Slaps Volume 2 does just that, slaps. Hard. You absolutely don’t want to miss this one.
You can hear the full album in this 10 minute mini-mix:
Or you can stream the songs individually and buy the album in high quality here:
