Ever since Ottawa artist Jesse Dangerously released his 2011 solo album Humble & Brilliant, fans have been asking when there would be a proper follow up album. Sure, there were singles, guest verses, remixes, and just about everything else he could do except make an album, but fans wanted that album. That finally stopped when Dangerously came back with not one, but two full length albums. One already came out earlier this year, when teamed up with producer Ambition to form a group called The Library Steps, who released an excellent album called Rap Dad, Real Dad. Now it’s time for project number two, a collaboration with producer Lizard Grove called Danger Grove, who drop their debut album, Want, For Nothing.

Colorado-based Grove first caught Dangerously’s attention back in about 2016, when they essentially sent an unsolicited remix to Jesse Dangerously. Fortunately, Dangerously really liked it, encouraged it, and in the fall of 2016, they put out a collection of seven remixes and one original song, which they just called Danger Grove. Since that time, they’ve continued to work together, and now the finished product is finally here. It’s especially interesting to listen to this album in contrast to Rap Dad, Real Dad. The group with Ambition was called The Library Steps because that was were both artists would meet up in Halifax as teenagers every Friday to participate in their local cypher. This is to say that while the album is written about their current life, there is part of the album that has one foot stuck in classic hip hop that they grew up on. Danger Grove, on the other hand, is all about musical adventure and risk taking. This is Dangerously’s chance to get weird with it, and he found the perfect adventurous collaborator in Lizard Grove. At any point in the album, you could hear some weird electronic music, some nerdcore, some folk music, or a fake radio show, just to touch on a few of the different things happening here. It’s an album that you really just need to buckle in and enjoy the ride and listen to the whole thing at once, because while there are all sorts of weird twists and turns on Want, For Nothing, it’s also been very carefully mapped out by Grove and Dangerously. If you just dropped the needle at random points on the album, you might think this album is really disconnected, but when you listen to it all the way through, you’ll understand how things transition into each other and how the musical conversation happens between these various points, and how there are callback moments. On top of all of this, the fact that this is a “weird” album also means that Dangerously feels safe to open up and take some lyrical risks, whether that means some more abstract and conceptual storytelling, or if it just means making a drinking song about how he doesn’t want to have answer your questions about why he doesn’t drink. This all comes together to make an album that is certainly unusual and far from your typical rap album, but it’s also got a strong emotional resonance to it’s weirdness.

Want, For Nothing, is not an album with a lot of direct peers. It’s weird, wild, and adventurous, and Dangerously and Grove have a great chemistry together that finds both artists encouraging each other to take risks and go for it.