K!MMORTAL is an artist from Vancouver who is almost a decade into their recording career. They had something of a breakout moment when they released their 2019 album, X Marks the Swirl, which found a second life when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself rapping along to “Sad Femme Club” in response to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings. In the time since X Marks the Swirl, there have been several singles from K!MMORTAL, but now it is finally time for a new full-length album, Shoebox.

One thing that should be noted up front is that while it is easy to describe K!MMORTAL as a hip hop artist and they are a dope emcee, that’s never been all that they are musically. Over the course of this album, we get a little of everything from K!MMORTAL, whether it be some hard rhymes, some ukelele singer/songwriter material, some sexy neo-soul, or some inspirational pop. In lesser hands, an album like this could easily sound like a mess, but this isn’t K!MMORTAL’s first rodeo, and they find ways to make it work. One is within the songwriting and arranging itself, figuring out when to blend elements and ratchet things up, and when to scale things back and let a moment land with just one particular aspect of their musicianship. Another is that the album is very smart with its sequencing, so that while the songs might vary a lot from track to track, you can hear the connective tissue and see how this is all part of what makes K!MMORTAL an artist. Finally, the big thing tying all of this together is K!MMORTAL the vocalist/emcee/frontperson/lyricist. Once K!MMORTAL steps to the mic, you again might get a lot of varied approaches, both in terms of singing and rapping, but also in dealing with a wide variety of subject matters across the album. This includes everything from race to gender to nationality to mental health to living an artistic life, just to name a few. K!MMORTAL is a dynamic performer, though, and there is a great blend of earnest and heartfelt moments combined with a sense of humor and these honest moments that swing from love to rage, which all come together to give you this incredibly deep and well-rounded vision of who K!MMORTAL is as an artist. When you put all of this together and then take a step back, you can begin to see what a beautifully complex and rewarding album Shoebox is.

K!MMORTAL is a complex person with a lot of competing layers to their identity, and they’ve experienced a lot in their life and their musical career. It only makes sense then, that this far into their recording career, we get an album as varied and layered and beautiful as Shoebox, something that you need to listen to multiple times before it can really begin to sink in how wonderful it really is.