OneWerd is a Bay Area emcee/producer who has been releasing music for years, and he has been especially busy lately. Just last year he released his full-length album, Timeless. Just last week, he released a collaborative EP with Dan Dillinger under the name of TXTMS. If that wasn’t enough, he just dropped a surprise EP, everything’s fine, i guess.

If you’re familiar with OneWerd, you might be thrown when you hit play on this EP and hear the title track to start things out. That’s because the song is quite different from the majority of his catalogue, as OneWerd spends the song singing in a pop/R&B style as he laments what went wrong in a romantic relationship. The first time I listened to it, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and have some type of wild beat kick in, but it just never happened. It’s not bad once you adjust your expectations, it’s just not the style of music that I’m used to hearing from OneWerd. However you feel about that track, once you get past it, it’s back to business as usual, as OneWerd brings in the wild drum patterns and mixes the weird electronic sounds with soulful samples to create some energetic tracks that will keep you on your toes. On the mic, he’s bringing in his sarcastic sense of humor as he discusses everything from pop culture to philosophy to the music industry to his personal life. My personal favorite “did it myself never looked back,” in which OneWerd starts going off on a tangent about Game of Thrones, only to interrupt himself on the mic and get the verse back on track.

everything’s fine, I guess is an interesting project, bringing together two sides of OneWerd. One where he experiments with sounding “normal,” and the other progressive hip hop side that we’re used to seeing out of him. Neither one is bad, and who knows if he’ll keep trying some different styles like this. In the meantime, I appreciate the risk.