Roxbury, MA’s own Isaiah Irahkiev is back with a new shot of adrenaline, dropping both the single and video for “Joyner Lucas,” a cut that utilizes Joyner’s “Ramen & OJ” beat. There is a familiar spirit, the urgency, the chip-on-shoulder tone, the I-still-have-something-to-prove grit, but Isaiah isn’t living through another man’s narrative. He weaponizes the beat for his own arc, pushing personal stakes through tight word choice and clean internal rhyme work.
The video, shot by The Watchers’ keeps it simple: one location, in and around a car. The camera sits in his face and forces the verses to do the heavy lifting. His vocal approach moves between cadences a few times over the course of the track, a small but meaningful marker that he is thinking in arrangement, not just dumping bars in a straight line. There are spots where the pen is clearly sharper than the average algorithm-fed rapper, and the hunger reads on screen without a costume.
If there is a miss, it is the same one that is haunting a lot of modern rap, and that’s the reliance on autotune as a default texture. The bars are strong enough to stand without the extra glaze, and hearing the top end get washed in tuning feels like a concession to trend rather than a creative choice. “Joyner Lucas” is off of Isaiah’s Sleepless in Boston. It is streaming everywhere now.
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