Calvin Valentine is a young producer from Eugene, Oregon that’s already made quite a name for himself. He’s produced a full-length album with Planet Asia, and he’s produced tracks like “God It” for De La Soul. Most recently, he produced the album Home for Illa J last summer. Now he comes back with a new beat tape, Plush Seats.

Now this release is a beat tape, and it does feel like one, with twenty tracks in the one to two-minute range, just giving you a taste of each groove before moving on to the next. However, where Valentine is able to elevate himself is how well each one of these beats is developed in this short time period, how hard they bang, and how there is enough variety throughout that he’s able to keep up momentum to carry listeners on through to the end. This sounds easy enough on paper, but if you’ve listened to more than a couple of beat tapes, you know how quickly things can start to sound generic and uninteresting. Valentine never suffers in that regard, switching up rhythms and instrumentations, but also deploying vocal samples and other effects at just the right time to make things maybe just a little weird, but never going too far off the rails. The end result is a beat tape that you can enjoy on headphones or blasting on your stereo, one that you can just put on and groove to and enjoy from start to finish. It’s not as fully developed as other projects that Valentine has been a part of, but it is more developed than most beat tapes you’ll listen to this year.

Plush Seats is the kind of beat tape you’ll want to play for aspiring producers to show them the amount of work it takes to put together a beat tape that stands apart from the crowd. Valentine has become a sought after producer in a short amount of time, and this beat tape certainly shows why.