Ratking are still experimenting. Rappers Wiki and Hak are just past their teens and neither seems interested in trying to duplicate the sound they arrived at with their debut last year. So It Goes was an impressively spirited 11-track capture of their still-developing take on New York City. Though they’ve been lazily described as representing a “new New York,” a convenient phrase that can miss the point, there’s a familiar uneasiness to the group’s relationship with their place of birth. If anything, Ratking is more like a new old New York, struggling with a place they belong but that doesn’t belong to them.
Collectively they manifest a cultural cannibalism that resounds with the city, a product of an equal appetite for punk, Dipset, grime, Jay Z, Animal Collective, and more. Unlike the emcees, producer Sporting Life clocked another year in his early 30s after So It Goes was released and is a weathered intellectual in approach. He has a knack for contorting samples beyond recognition and filling up space with pleasantly opposing odds and ends.
The trio’s new EP is a surprise release offered as a BitTorrent Bundle, a release format that innovatively utilizes the peer-to-peer client productively direct to fans. The experiment dates back to 2012 and counts projects from the likes of Public Enemy, Madonna, and Moby from its ranks. Despite at least a dozen or so prior releases, the idea didn’t grab hold fully perhaps until Thom Yorke’s $6 album bundle last September, the first time money exchanged hands and a rollout that reportedly netted him some $20 million as of a couple months ago. Like the Radiohead frontman, Ratking are signed to XL Recordings and the impetus for their BitTorrent partnership seems at least inspired by their label mate’s success with the configuration. Ratking’s is a free drop but benefits from the same infrastructure, facilitating the no-fuss release of a project less than three months after it was recorded. Immediately, it seems, the EP has caught on, earning the group more downloads in half an hour than they’ve sold albums up to this point. The freeness offers an unsurprising boon to the numbers, but they still prove that fans are clamoring for more.
Musically 700 Fill builds on Ratking’s experimentalism. “Bethel” has a chipmunk-Soul sample that cuts through an entirely separate electronic psychedelic ambience: an echoey chant sustains itself behind a dance-appropriate vocal stab while synths pop off somewhere else. Hak and Wiki spit tough and the ad-libs sound like a DJ Clue tape. Beautifully, there’s a lot going on. “Eternal Reveal” submits entirely to a glittery, vibe-driven vocal backdrop with a saxophone solo more sweet than the tripped out one that appears on “Arnold Palmer.” For a project more than a dozen minutes shorter than their full-length 700 Fill has as many features as the last one did on a single track, plus three more. Hak and Wiki are still the stars on the mic though, their gaze all the while fixed on home.
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Rarely lines fall a little flat, like a comparatively stodgy hook on the first track: “American Gods, we living the American Dream / Travel the world, we out for the cream.” Mostly though, like the cold winter theme that propels the EP, the rappers are aggressive and biting. Wiki’s voice and delivery — eccentric and accentuated — affords him the traditional lead. Hak’s register is lower and he raps more linearly. Throughout, Ratking is literally and figuratively wrapped up in New York, bundled tight in “Steep Tech” and consumed with coming to terms with their place in the city. “I don’t get along with New York, what a place to be broke and be poor,” Hak chants on “Sticky Trap.” Elsewhere, on “Bethel,” he spits, “You ain’t from New York, you just talking shit.” Sporting Life is hilariously contextual on “Sticky Trap” himself: “Saw a CITI bike, I was hype that shit’s unlatched / NYPD put the cuffs on me, how is sick is that?” It’s a perfect microcosm for the specific angst that permeates everywhere, railing against the economically new New York while trying to take some of it back. The whole song is that way too, the members painting themselves as savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls of the place but susceptible all the same. Wiki impresses with a thoughtful but often raw lyricism, his verses sometimes sounding like outbursts. On “Makeitwork” he’s anxious about getting by with no room to worry about making “it.” He puts together a just-so lyrical pattern, sometimes starting a bar with the same word he finished the last one with. “Wanna talk about that, wanna talk about this / Let you talk about / Talking about walking ‘round with / With a knot in my neck, man / My job is a mess / I clock in around 6 / And I’m going to 6.”
Unlike some of their 1990s-obsessed contemporaries, Ratking transcend rote nostalgia with a more eclectic palate. Despite the sustained reference to cold-weather gear of decades past—the title itself a nod to high-quality down jackets—the group still isn’t trying to recreate. They’re not even trying to replicate their own success, which is even more ambitious and relevant here. The six-day recording period that spawned their latest has built a short project that sounds more in-the-moment than rushed. 700 Fill can endure as a generally cold-hardened EP but it squarely reflects this particularly frigid New York City winter. On top of a captivatingly evolving sound Ratking’s most consistent allure is exactly that tendency to offer gritty snapshots with gusto.
