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Rae Sremmurd VibeZ

Fourteen tracks from two brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi, who made some of the most joyful and least self-serious rap records of their decade.

RaeSremmurd

Rae Sremmurd

Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi are brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi, and their group name is their label spelled backwards — Ear Drummers, the imprint run by producer Mike WiLL Made-It, who is effectively the third member.

They arrived in the mid-2010s as something close to a pop group: irrepressibly energetic, melodically inventive, and entirely uninterested in the seriousness that dominated rap at the time. That got them dismissed as lightweight, which missed the point badly — the songwriting is considerably more sophisticated than the tone suggests.

Swae Lee in particular turned out to be one of the most gifted melodists of his generation, which the later solo work made unmistakable.

What to listen for

"Black Beatles" with Gucci Mane is the biggest record here and a genuinely strange one to have become a global number one — slow, hazy, and built around a guitar figure rather than a drop. Its success was accelerated by an internet craze, which is its own piece of history.

"Guatemala" and "Heat Of The Moment" come from Swaecation, the Swae Lee half of the triple album, and both show the melodic writing at its most exposed.

"Perplexing Pegasus" and "Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame" are the hardest things here, and the Mike WiLL production on both is exceptional.

"Chanel" with Pharrell Williams and "Aries (YuGo)" with Big Sean, Quavo and Pharrell are the all-star moments.

"Bedtime Stories" with The Weeknd is the most atmospheric, and "Anti-Social Smokers Club" with Zoë Kravitz is the oddest credit.

Post Malone's "Spoil My Night" is the guest appearance that best demonstrates Swae Lee's hook-writing — the same skill that made "Sunflower" one of the most-streamed songs ever recorded.

Go deeper

SremmLife 2 (2016) is the best album, and SR3MM (2018) is the sprawling triple set that separates the two brothers onto their own records.

Mike WiLL Made-It's production catalogue is worth tracing on its own — he is one of the defining sonic architects of 2010s rap and his work runs from Miley Cyrus to Kendrick Lamar.

Listening note: the songwriting is hiding behind the energy. Strip the production off almost anything here and what is left is a real melody with proper structure, which is why these records survive being covered and why the hooks kept turning up on other people's biggest singles. Lightness is not the same as slightness.

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