Many of the songs call for unity and love with several mentions of an impending Armageddon, and Raury tackles these huge topics with ambitious arrangements. On the opening title track, he sets the tone for his flower child vibes: 'Don’t hate, my brother/ God is our friend/ I walked for miles and/ I see no end/ To the hate.' The writing is angst-y and centric to a wide-eyed, teenage worldview: chasing girls and soothing parents and saving the Earth. The album is mostly a reprise of his boho hippie rap tunes, wandering in and out of folk territory with lots of stringy acoustic riffs, hedging toward rock with hip-hop spirit, casually blending influences like a Tumblr kid that grew up in a post-Napster world. This one is anchored by its single, 'Devil’s Whisper', which puts a slightly darker tint on the hand-clapping-around-the-campfire folk of its predecessor. Raury emerged with a fully formed aesthetic, but his sound, albeit fascinating, still needs time to incubate.įrom start to finish, All We Need scans as Indigo Child Redux with similar pacing and nearly identical tropes. Sometimes, like on the RZA-featuring 'CPU', it works well and sometimes, like on Big K.R.I.T.-featuring 'Forbidden Knowledge', it completely misses the mark. The wrinkles haven't been ironed out yet his genre-mashing can be scatterbrained and even hollow. Instead, much like Indigo Child, it's merely an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius with as many hiccups.

It isn't ahead of its time or magnificent in scope. He is literally indie rap, and his debut album, All We Need, searches further for perfect balance.Īll We Need isn't the transcendent Raury project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling, the one that reconciles genre distinctions and renders them obsolete. The singer-songwriter has a real sense for composition and a knack for ambiguity, and he, like his stylistic forebear André 3000, remains at arm's length from hip-hop, never quite a full-fledged rapper but certainly draped in the tropes of the genre, reaping the benefits of everything cool and useful that comes from identifying with it. Still, it effectively established Raury as this sort of genre migrant who existed adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it. It was stuffed with big ideas, but it often had trouble wrangling them. That EP was a daring first statement with soulful alternative rock jams supercut with real, recorded fights he had with his mother. Raury made his big debut in 2014 with the folk-leaning EP Indigo Child, which was anchored by its single and centerpiece 'God’s Whisper'.

Raury all we need charts