As a group, musicians who move to LA hoping to, I guess, run into an A&R at Erewhon are generally dogged, tortured, starving, and desperate. 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://open.spotify.com/album/0qUeU7XbOneuP5IwPfQeEO?si=2f7XLp1-S7mRjODvzfyJ3w
https://youtube.com/@splashdowney2638?si=KKQVn47jk51bqkw0
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