Vinyl - Lil 2 Dow - 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2 - Hand numbered edition

Baltimore artist Lil 2 Dow sounds like he’s never raised his voice in his life. His rapping is practically incidental, unscrolling in a gentle murmur, but that shouldn’t be misconstrued as careless. 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2 deliberately pivots between downtempo dirges and more upbeat tracks that crib from New Orleans and the DMV alike, finding depth in the chasm between the spoils of hustling and the myriad consequences these extralegal activities can entail. So the easygoing bounce of “How You Love Dat,” rife with firearm flexes and neighborly devotion (“I did it for the hood”), quickly yields to the cloistered melancholy of “The Whole Thing,” alternately paranoid (“They hit the door you gotta flush that shit”) and wistful. On that song, 2 Dow places himself in a lineage with Jeezy, Lil Wayne, and Lil Meech, which neatly encapsulates his rap persona: not just the dealer or the sipper, but also an heir to an established dynasty, in this case the A$AP Ant-founded rap label Marino Infantry. Ant pops through on “Jammin” alongside A$AP Twelvyy, a spikier sequel to 2023’s velvety “The Ankle Lock,” though neither can quite steal the spotlight from their host, who grumbles, “don’t be talking reckless on my trap phone.”

Of particular note is how Lil 2 Dow and executive producer Zeke Mishanec weave together disparate samples, from 1970s R&B collective The Moments to British singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya. These samples are deployed in disparate fashion: on “Bangin Needles,” a chopped soul fragment sits front and center in the mix, while on “China White,” the beat tilts in and out of earshot, as if listening with your head underwater. The ebb and flow dials up the impact of 2 Dow’s bars as he dismisses the “phony” and uncouth “jabronis” around him.

Or take the moody shuffle of “Quetiapine,” named for the active ingredient in antipsychotic medication. The wins that 2 Dow has tallied up so far on Vol. 2 seem to fall apart in the face of loss: family members struggling with addiction, friends who were institutionalized and came back not quite the same. Yet even in this morass, Lil 2 Dow holds his head high. “My auntie, she a junkie, still from Wakanda,” he intones on the hook, casually injecting the song with vulnerability and dignity. You imagine that another rapper might lean on this moment, either attempting to humanize drug users or establish a supervillain persona, so nihilistic that money matters more than family. For Lil 2 Dow, this sort of complexity is blase, and so 21 Gun Salute, Vol. 2 finds depth without preaching and swagger without stunting. In a world of artists obsessed with looking cool, Lil 2 Dow is a rare outlier: a rapper so cool, you can hear it when he whispers.