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Photo: Abdi Ibrahim

After years of sporadic singles and oversharing on Twitter, rapper, comedian, and internet darling Zack Fox releases his debut project shut the fuck up talking to me. You may recognize Fox from classics such as the Kenny Beats-assisted "Jesus Is the One (I Got Depression)" or personal favorite, "The Bean Kicked In," but all his comedic musical efforts culminate in a 20-minute mixtape that is fighting with PinkPantheress for the shortest album of the season award.

Whether he's rapping about being in the strip club with glue on the bottom of his shoe or smoking cigs on the playground, Fox has spent the past two years preparing for this moment. shut the fuck up talking to me is a tightly woven and unironically great record that somehow stands out in 2021's stacked lineup of releases. To commemorate this release, it seems only right to honor the project the way Zack would want - by having a Caucasian male talk about it for a few paragraphs.

If you've been keeping up with Fox's singles over the past couple of years, then shut the f**k up talking to me should feel familiar in the best way possible. The equally humorous and aggressive flow that the rapper and comedian adopts is not unlike what fans have heard on tracks like "Stick" in the past. Somehow, instilling each track with both laid-back confidence and impatient exhaustion, Fox delivers listeners a refreshingly original entry into 2021's hip-hop roster. shut the fuck up talking to me is just as full of great tracks as it is with classic one-liners, with our hero holding nothing back while delivering bars like "Black and white diamonds / Man my wrist should be on BLACKED" and  "My niggas barbaric, shit could get ugly as fuck like Ed Sheeran."

What does come as a surprise, however, is how varied the musical direction is on shut the f**k up talking to me. While many of the tracks evoke days spent in high school cooking up lowbrow hip-hop offerings that doubled as comedic disses to the world at large, some are borderline cinematic, others minimalistic, and many pull from both southern and west-coast rap styles. shut the fuck up talking to me's eponymous closing track is literally produced by The Alchemist, and at this point, Fox's music career has long moved past the ironic, because he's sincerely not just good at what he does, but great.    

Listen to shut the fuck up talking to me  below: