Ardamus is an emcee/producer originally from Nashville, but he’s been based in D.C. for quite some time. He’s been putting out music for about two decades now, with a myriad of different projects released at a prolific pace. Two years ago, he linked up with Cold Rhymes to put out an album with Height Keech, Astro Blocks. After releasing a self-produced album on his own Camponography label, Insurance For Your Self Esteem, he is now back on Cold Rhymes to deliver a new full-length album, *Psychedelic City Cowboy $h!t.

Psychedelic City Cowboy $h!t is an album about exploring your relationship to a city when you’ve lived there long enough to finally consider it “your city.” As with any relationship, it gets complicated pretty quickly, with a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns, but Ardamus is there to guide you through the discussion of each angle he approaches the city at over the course of the album. This could be exploring the city’s nightlife, it’s racial economy, the daily grind, or even just finding a moment of peace within the hustle and bustle. To do all of this, Ardamus is producing about half of the tracks while Height Keech is producing the other half, with one co-production assist from Secret Weapon Dave as well. The cool thing here is that Ardamus and Keech where clearly on the same page when it came to this project, because if you’re not looking at the liner notes, it’s not immediately obvious who is producing which track. That’s because they are both working with big drums and psychedelic/garage/soul samples, often going for some big barn burners, but also leaving some room for a few slower intimate tracks to open up the soundscape a bit and allow for some emotional moments to hit gently when they need to. Overall, though, you’re going to want to turn this shit up so you can bob your head and make some stank face while you’re listening to this album. More than anything, Ardamus is coming at you with the energy of someone who’s been in the game a quarter of the time that he has. And that’s what makes this album so enjoyable and such a compelling relisten – Ardamus isn’t going through the motions or just phoning in some old man raps, he’s giving you some of his most exciting production and engaging lyricism of his career to date. Even if you take a track like “Festival Love,” with Ratarue, what at first seems like a really simple song about playing a nice festival gives way to a much more nuanced discussion about how even the best music festival has its pluses and minuses, and hopefully you can find the ones where the minuses aren’t too bad. On the other end of the spectrum, you also get plenty of really charged songs, such “The Most Relaxed War We Will Ever Fight,” which sees Ardamus going in on the class politics of his city and beyond.

Psychedelic City Cowboy $h!t didn’t have to be as good as it is. Ardamus could have easily just pumped out a few boom bap tracks and gone through the motions on the mic and called it day, just resting on his laurels of two decades worth of hip hop. Instead, he’s giving us the most exciting, inspired, and complex album of his career, one that is immediately accessible and enjoyable, and then just reveals itself to be incredibly smart and layered so you have to keep coming back to catch all of the little pieces.