Come year’s end, Rome Fortune will likely find himself in our “Best Albums of 2014” feature. Twice. Busy spring and summer seasons followed Beautiful Pimp II, a mindful manifesto through which the Atlantan trailblazer made his case for a uniformly lush, airy aesthetic. Fortune followed his February offering with liberally applied creativity, retiring a refined formula and tossing it in a vat of radioactive glory. The past four or five months have seen Rome stray from what he knows sounds good to what he believes sounds good. For all the talented music makers on the come-up, very few excite quite like Fortune. Even fewer can accurately claim to be as close to the spotlight as this indie hip-hop artist, whose imminent shine grows brighter with each drop.
Small VVorld, a FreEP that Fortune labeled on Twitter as his first real album, ties together all those experimental forays and one-off records beneath a singular roof. It’s a work of refinement and reinvention, a rolodex of regional, national and global influences spindled into one sonic concept. Somehow, Rome extracts cohesion from eclecticism.
Silkk Tha Shocker shoutouts and anthemic synth drives ground SVV in its southern roots. As do featured guests OG Maco (who makes opening track “The Experiment” something of an event) and iLoveMakonnen. But Rome keeps any overlap with current Atlanta norms at a minimum, which is wise when the A pumps out one buzzworthy artist after another every other week. The material won’t stale anytime soon. “FriendsMaybe” will steamroll your brain until you can’t help but sing its giddy hook. “5 Second Rule” makes a heavy-hitting club banger out of middle school’s governing law. I almost fell down a library stairwell while dancing to “Workin’ Gal,” so that’s all I’ll say about that.
Click on the first song and slide through the album from start to finish. You’ll laugh and smile, snap and shout. Above all else, you’ll play it back again and again. Stream Fortune’s landmark Small VVorld EP in its entirety (you know where to go) and download the 11-track project right here.
“FriendsMaybe” is song of the year material
[…] Fortune‘s latest video, lifted from his stellar Small VVorld EP, is titled “Four Seasons,” but you can think of it as the fourth dimension. Specters of pop […]
you’re the best for not fronting 🙂
I don’t love this—the subject matter ain’t really my thing—but this sounds so good I can’t front.