ZWAARD

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Beans already sounded savvy beyond his years during his 2000s-spanning decade in Antipop Consortium. So once he hit his fifties his age actually caught up with him in the sense that he's a sort of ideal for indie rap's journey into the AARP demographic: experienced enough to know a thousand ways to diminish anyone who questions his art, but confident enough to know he doesn't have to throw out his voice trying to impress anyone else. He's always taken the burden of having too many ideas for anyone's own good and making it sound like a source of strength, especially since he's built up a long and steady run of rap language brainstorming that could be defined as exhaustive if he ever showed any signs of exhausting himself. But Beans just keeps haranguing the cosmos on ZWAARD, a collaboration with Finnish avant-footwork producer Sasu Ripatti that sees him aging not so much gracefully but imposingly. He spits bitter recriminations through insult-comedy one-liners and left-field non sequitur punchlines that add some levity to a surly vibe that feels marrow-deep: "rappers is cliquey like little girls braiding each others' hair giving each other bad dating advice" ("ZWAARD 7"); "they say your art is good but they got bad taste" ("ZWAARD 12"); "you're washed but hate water" ("ZWAARD 14").

While his hemorrhage of a flow makes it sound like he's treating the beat like an afterthought, both parties can afford to: not only is it breath-snatching to be barraged by Beans' voice, but Ripatti's beats assert themselves so confrontationally through their serrated juke and mutant-trap rhythms that it feels like you're getting clobbered from both sides. It's only asynchronous until you're overwhelmed—at which point the clarity of the haunting memento mori structure beneath the bravado really sinks in: the cycle of growing up in broken homes you inevitably perpetuate yourself ("ZWAARD 2"), the sense that you have to confront your own flaws before battling anyone else ("ZWAARD 12"), and the urge to fight yourself bloody to preserve your legacy ("ZWAARD_OVER)." If there's a throughline to be found in ZWAARD, it's the statement in "ZWAARD 7" that "life makes no sense so they assign meaning to art"—but Beans has lived enough that he's able to assign art to meaning. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz