Splash Downey is not any of these things.
He lives in an apartment on a quiet street in Santa Monica where a walk one block west brings
into view the long line of the pacific, along the shore of which it is his habit to talk long edible
tinted walks. Also in that apartment is his sound engineer, Skelli – who has worked with the likes
of Yeat and Young Nudy – a fortunate arrangement and perhaps what allowed his latest project,
titled The Splash Tape 3 (and this article’s primary subject), to be what it was.
On that subject: the 10-song 26-minute third-installment released on October 20 of this year and
features a song you might call Dance or EDM, several you’d call Rap, a handful of Pop, one
that’s Hyperpop, two Folk, and at least one official Very Sad Love Song. More helpful for getting
a sense of the project’s breadth would probably be to simply play the first 5 seconds of each
track. Tight and punchy beats skip to echoing industrial ones skip to acoustic snaps skip to
something like a production software having an orgasm.
Splash approaches the gauntlet thrown down by rangey production with a necessary skill set of
hyphen pop artists: he can sing, and he can rap. He can also, crucially, switch between the two,
and adopt tones and pitches somewhere in the gray area of their blend.
The assortment of voices and genre pulls on the project squares with Splash as an artist who
prides himself on his wide music-listening and knack for locating the needle of what makes a
particular song or genre enjoyable in the haystack of its superficial aesthetic. He is unprejudiced
against sounds he hasn’t heard before, a rare characteristic.
Versatility is also reflected in the project’s enlisting four additional artists of wide genre range in
feature roles. Rahn Harper and Avery Grace provide poppy vocals on “Sundress” and “I Like
You Too”, respectively, while Mick Jenkins and BigBabyGucci assist from opposite ends of the
hiphop spectrum. Jenkins lends his legendary lo-fi rap talent to “What’s Your Phone?” while
BigBabyGucci, a melody specialist at the forefront of LA’s hyperpop and rage music wave,
provides chorus and verse on one of the album’s standout tracks, “Don’t Go on Dates!”
This does not mean The Splash Tape 3 is a diasporic safari to the edges of genre—in the grand
scheme of things the album hews fairly closely to its core sound, announced at the very latest
by “Like That”, the second track. But as is always the case, the sensibilities of the creator leak
into the work in unexpected ways and places. All of this to say that if you come across a sound
like Maxwell covering Kate Bush through the mouthpiece of 100 Gecs, that might be on
purpose.
Splash and his third tape sit squarely in the lineage of artists who enter music making through
rap and gradually drift towards something more sonically expansive. Exemplars would be Mac
Miller, Dominic Fike, Baby Keem, Frank Ocean, who are some of Downey’s main influences to
this day.
Permeating the album is a sense of becoming. Splash Downey has been at this a while. Over
the years the sound has morphed and refined and developed. The next album will not sound
like this one. Pinned through the years and the work though is a visible thread of improvement.
He gets better every time. And it would seem that people are starting to notice. The last Splash
Tape has been streamed over 200k times. This one is better. Now is the time to listen.
https://instagram.com/splashdowney?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
https://youtube.com/@splashdowney2638?si=KKQVn47jk51bqkw0
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