Portland artist Claud Six has given us a lot of music over the years under a lot of different names and projects, whether it be R4PC4MP, Jellyfish Brigade, Hives Inquiry Squad, BCxLD, or Shut-ins and the Colony. As someone who is constantly working on different projects, Six found himself in the position recently where he wasn’t necessarily ready to start on a new project, but as he begun to look through his hard drive (pantry) and pull out some random songs (ingredients), he realized that he had a decent make-shift album (meal). That album (meal) is here in the form of Pantry.

If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. That’s essentially the message behind Pantry. This album has a ton of cooks in the kitchen, with Danny Umi, Kelbel, Big Jess, Father Focus Confucius, Slurgeon, JayRadBeats, Taco Neck, Jaramie the Great, akamoto x Zepeda, Aaron Zeitlin, Smoke M2D6, and Claud Six himself all providing production, but Six is careful in his selections and sequencing so that you get a good flow as you move from tracks that lean in a more pop-friendly R&B style of production to classic boom bap to some more abstract and experimental beats and back again. There are a couple of guests on the mic as well, including Dig Mode and IAME, but it’s Six’s voice that’s able to bring everything together and help this all make sense. He’s rapping and singing in his low voice that has a nice rasp to it, which works well with the casual swing to his flow that makes the whole album feel really conversational. As we work our way through the album, we’re touching on everything from more abstract philosophical rhymes to shit-talk about the NBA, but most of it falls in the sweet middle area where Six is just rhyming about his everyday home life and building with his friends. The result is an album that is just really easy to listen to and relate to.

Pantry is one of the best happy accidents of the early new year. When you work as hard and as frequently as Claud Six does, you’re bound to rack up a few gems that get stuck in vault for various reasons. Fortunately, when he decided to do a little mid-winter cleaning, those gems added up to a nice new album.