Back in 2013, Jacksonville artists and friends Dillon and Paten Locke started a little label called Full Plate. Things were going relatively well for them over the next couple of years as they filled out the roster with artists like Batsauce and Willie Evans Jr. Then, in the summer of 2019, Paten Locke got a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer and quickly passed away that August. It was a devastating loss for the indie hip hop community, but the label pressed on in his memory. Now, three years after his passing, we get his first posthumous album, Americancer.

Before you jump to any conclusions about the title of the album, Paten Locke originally recorded most of this material back in 2017 and had picked the title as it neared completion. You can call it irony or foreshadowing or just an unfortunate coincidence, but it wasn’t done in poor taste after the fact by anyone else. Once you get past the title and press play on the album, you’re off to the races, and you’re quickly reminded of what a talent Paten Locke was. A triple threat, he’s rhyming, producing, and scratching on this album, all at a high level. The whole album feels incredibly raw, in the best way possible. There’s nothing shiny or polished about this album, it’s just straight hip hop that feels like you’re hearing it as it comes into Locke’s head. Locke is flipping all of these dusty obscure samples, whether they be jazz, soul, rock or anything else he could get his hands onto and turning them into some energetic and funky hip hop beats. Once he got that laid down, he’s just going ham on the mic, feeding off of that energy and going in on the wordplay as he makes some keen social observations, talks some shit, and generally has some fun with it as he laces everything with his sarcastic sense of humor. There are a few songs that are more fully developed pop songs, with hooks and everything, but a large portion of the album feels more like a bedroom mixtape in its grimiest form. To fill out the album, we get a few verses from familiar Full Plate faces in Dillon and Willie Evans Jr., but we also get a few pleasant surprises with the inclusion of Kat Thundergun, Edan, and Mr. Lif. It all comes together to make it feel like a wonderful community sendoff for Locke.

Posthumous albums are always tricky affairs, but fortunately, Paten Locke had Americancer mostly finished before he passed, and the folks at Full Plate didn’t try to dress it up and make it anything it wasn’t. They just stuck with the original energy of the project and saw it through to fruition.