Mel. Crozby is a young emcee from Birmingham who is part of the RDFND crew. He released his first EP, The Free Tea EP, in the summer of 2017. It was a fun introduction to someone with a lot of charisma and potential, and he was certainly winning people over with his live shows. After this initial introduction, the question started to be what would he do next? Well, the answer is here in the form of a new EP, Diplopia.

One of my favorite things is when I find a young artist with potential, and then I watch them grow into themselves. When Crozby dropped his first EP, it was all about a young man having fun with his friends and making this really playful style of hip hop. You could certainly see the talent and charisma there, but you couldn’t necessarily guess where he was going to from there. Sometimes, though, life has a way of throwing you curveballs and letting you know what the next step is going to be. In that way, Crozby has decided with his new EP that is was time to talk openly and frankly with his mental health issues. Working with Birmingham producers Black Plastique, K1NG ELJAY, D Gut, and Erthling., he gets just the combination of soulful boom bap and synth-driven beats to strike the somber tone he needs to tell his stories. Crozby is dealing with issues of anxiety and depression, but what’s really impressive here is that he’s not trying to shock you and beg for your sympathy, he’s just trying to get you to walk a mile in his shoes, to live day in and day out trying to do your best in dealing with these issues. In relaying everything in this fashion, he also lets you see how treatment is a process that is different for everybody. On top of the maturity of the subject matter and how he’s handling it, it’s also impressive to see the subtle technical growth as well, where he’s using different flows and rhyme schemes, not in flashy ways, just in effective ways to tell his stories and make them interesting to listen to. It’s a short project, but Crozby makes every little bit count.

While I expected some growth on Crozby’s next project, I don’t know that I was ready for something like Diplopia. It’s incredibly mature and thoughtful, and it takes a lot to allow yourself to be so vulnerable on the mic and talk about something as personal as mental health. Hopefully others will hear this and know that they’re not alone, and that this is a conversation that they can have a well.