Medium Zach is a Twin Cities artist who first got started in the mid-‘00s with the group Big Quarters. Since their last release in 2012, he’s been focused on producing for other artists, working with people like I Self Divine, Mankwe Ndosi, Lady Midnight, and Homeboy Sandman, as well as getting involed in education. After all he’s accomplished, Medium Zach is still finding ways to push himself, now presenting his first full-length solo album, Bad by Myself.

So many instrumental albums produced today come from novice artists just playing with equipment and making some generic hip hop beats. This is totally fine if you’re learning and getting your reps in, but it can flood the market and make the more fully formed projects harder to find sometimes. Then you come across a project like Bad by Myself and suddenly you hear the difference from an artist that has done the work and is ready to push the boundaries. This album is already interesting and funky and a lot of fun to listen to the first time through with no prior knowledge of what went into the album, but then when you dig just a little deeper, you start to realize just how special this project is. That’s because the different sounds that were sampled and flipped and turned into these songs all tell a much deeper story. For example, the opening track, “Pancakes,” was created from sounds recorded when Medium Zach decided to make his family pancakes for breakfast and thought that the sound of the bowl landing on the table and the sound of the whisk hitting the rim of the bowl could be his kick and snare, and then started to build out from there. As you make your way through the next three songs, Medium Zach is furthering his musical exploration of domestic life, mostly using found sounds from around the house as his building blocks. Once you get to the fifth track, “Twenty Years,” the album begins to expand as Zach looks to his musical colleagues and builds a song out of different improvised pieces from the Twin Cities band Heiruspecs, recorded when they were rehearsing for their twenty-year anniversary show a few years back. Over the next few tracks, he’s building off of samples of musical friends like Javier Santiago, Greg Grease, The Crunchy Kids, Lady Midnight, Mankwe Ndosi, and his brother Brandon Allday. A few of the samples might be a bit more traditional, snipping a guitar line here, a bit of flugelhorn there, but just as many are interesting and unexpected contributions that are more about the overall feeling of these tracks than getting Lady Midnight to just sing a chorus over a hip hop beat. The lone exception to this rule is the inclusion of Open Mike Eagle, whose verse on “Hold the Parade” is not only dope, but breaks up the album at just the right moment.

Bad by Myself is a dope instrumental album by a talented producer that is completely enjoyable at face value, with really funky and well developed songs that will take you on an emotional journey. When you start to dig a little deeper and realize not just how creative this album is, but how much of himself that Medium Zach put into this album, everything hits just a little deeper and you start to realize just how special this album is.