Song You Need: Mavi cooks on “Baking Soda”

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

As dense as Mavi‘s verses are, you wouldn’t call him a “lyrical” rapper. He’s not concerned with tricks of language or strained didacticism so much as he is assembling an all-consuming picture. On “Sense,” a song from his 2020 debut album Let The Sun Talks, he raps, “’What kind of songs you make?’ I make the kind you gotta read, baby.” He’s literate in the poetry of his own soul, a quality that goes far beyond mere talent as an MC.

“Baking Soda,” the first single from Mavi’s upcoming album Laughing So Hard It Hurts (out on October 14) is a song that’s warm and celebratory without losing a sense of poignance. At the song’s opening, Mavi acknowledges how his work ethic has kept him an independent artist while also setting his life on a course that’s at least partially out of his hands: “Habits sent me places that I can’t control / I established it alone, nothing major though.” The melody of his flow matches Monte Booker’s beat, a glitchy soul sample with a seriously blown-out kick. It keeps things entrancing and playful while Mavi reflects on his come-up, and that quality doesn’t get more touching than on the outro: “I been gave my soul away to the drum, Imma live forever / We ain’t come from gold spoon but gold chains, my niggas clever.”

1. High John
2. Spoiled Brat
3. Baking Soda
4. Doves
5. Quiet On Set
6. 3 Left Feet
7. My Good Ghosts
8. Reason!
9. Hemlock
10. Having My Way
11. Known Unknowns
12. Trip (feat. Amindi)
13. Opportunity Kids
14. The Inconvenient Truth
15. Chinese Finger Trap
16. Last Laugh