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Photo: Christopher Yellen 

Great producers are keenly aware of foundational ideas, the building blocks upon which creativity is hoisted, allowed to flourish and grow. In Control Freak, Billy Lemos does all that but ironically also lets go, learning that like in architecture, flexibility is strength, that the ebbs and flows of physics create something evermore permanent and lasting. Better yet if you find ideal collaborators, builders who take a material and make it their own, pouring a harmonic structure into the beat-laden embed until it hardens into rhythmic concrete.

Lemos, like many young producers, started as a beatmaker, evolving from sampling to song construction with a very keen sense of what worked best, applying a weirdness, taking a genre and making it less familiar, his prior work famed for flipping tempos and stretching genres into messy arrangements. In Control Freak, his veteran ears have allowed for something less intuitive to a producer, a surrendering of pace and space, and the results are a delicate, layered nourishment for your ears.

Start in on "No Place Here." The beat takes deep breaths, allowing for vocals, through distortion to linger, harmonizing in an off-balance haze that feels like it is about to topple over before the beat rights it again. In "Good As Gold," a sweet sticky vocal builds into a beat-backed feedback crescendo before quieting into a beautiful guitar-plucking acoustic outro. The orchestration isn’t busy, just a challenge to tradition, and it continues on the star-laden effort "COCKPIT" that builds into a fist-punching kick snare sound that is built for biniki’s staccato vocals, before slowing, almost eroding at the end.

"Secrecies" features hints of pop-punk production but it is muffled, stretched, and compressed into an angsty chorus-driven gem. "Going On" has a cosmic atmospheric vibe, a space-time system backdrop that along with loose tongue then pitched-up vocals creates what is the funkiest track on the EP. "Concentrate" is a trumpet-punctuated, tightly-wound song that is deftly balanced by Duo Saleh’s airy, softly dealt vocals, pausing before unwinding again.

When producers turn to their artist-facing side, usually it is a partial curiosity, often a belief more can be done with less artist involvement, but with Lemos, it is about plugging unique sources into the right places—mixing, matching, and creating a mosaic that is impossible not to put on repeat. 

Listen to Control Freak below: