AJ Suede is an artist from Seattle who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s. He has been really stepping it up in the past couple of years, working with artists like Televangel and Small Professor, and releasing projects on labels like Fake Four. In 2023 alone, he’s already released two albums, and now he’s back with a third, Ark Flashington.

While he will occasionally work with an outside producer to achieve a different sound, AJ Suede is an excellent producer himself, and Ark Flashington is all Suede on the beats. To this end, this album is an excellent crash course on AJ Suede if you’ve never listened to him before, since he’s producing and rhyming, and just showing you all the different sides of who he is as an artist. On the beats, he’s carving up some West Coast left field boom bap, taking your expectations and just subverting them a little, whether it be a beat flip or an unexpected sample that takes the music in a different direction. The majority of the album is midtempo, which lends itself to this conversational style of flow that Suede is using on the mic, largely working in this stream-of-consciousness type of energy, almost like he’s freestyling in a cypher where the deejay might put on a weird beat because he knows Suede can handle it. As a result, you get this delightfully odd album where you always have to keep your ears perked, because you never know when Suede is going to drop some sort of wry observation or a personal revelation, or maybe the beat is just going to pivot and go off in some sort of psychedelic direction. Whatever it is, you can be sure that it is creative, interesting, and engaging.

Ark Flashington is yet another excellent entry into AJ Suede’s discography. He’s been really ramping up the effort in recent years, and each year keeps getting better than the last. I don’t know if he has anything else up his sleeve for 2023, but he’s already crushed it so far.