When it comes to spitting dexterity on the mic, one would be hard-pressed to name anyone with more natural lyrical prowess than Columbus, GA-native rapper Brandon ‘BEZ’ Evans (B Easy). One half of the recently minted experimental/electronic hip-hop duo Revival Season, jointly with beatmaker Jonah Swilley, the gifted wordsmith has been at the rap game for about a decade at this point. Sporting a five-project strong solo discography of his own—with 2023’s Trap Sabbath as the clear standout amongst it—the MC managed to turn industry heads in spades at the beginning of last year, as he and Swilley dropped the exceptional Golden Age of Self-Snitching.

Revival Season’s 14-track debut LP clocks in just shy of forty minutes of runtime, and it’s an all-killer no-filler exercise in alternative hip-hop, with several indebted nods to electronic, funk, and dub music. Handily one of the most exciting rap debuts in the first half of the 2020s decade, Golden Age of Self-Snitching introduced the erratic duo to the world by way of zany, catchy, and carefree rap cuts more akin to cypher-like streams of consciousness, than cohesive label concept tapes. Owing their creative footprint to Linkin Park, Kendrick Lamar, Fever 333, Black Thought, and Mach-Hommy all in equal measure, the record pierces through the listeners’ sonic membranes like the warm hug of an earwormy fire alarm sound.

The project was puzzle-pieced together entirely self-sufficiently, written both remotely and in person, and recorded in different makeshift locations—including a health centre and an ad-hoc setup in Swilley’s house. BEZ’s bars take your breath away, precisely because he is low-key delivering them breathless himself. Sample “Barry White” at number two on the tracklist, a joint that has the MC dish out one 16 after another like his literal life depended on it—not without subdued Kanye West hat tips (“penitentiary chances”, “Brandon”)—on top of what sounds like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” iconic six-string lick. The grandiose and spacey “Message in a Bottle“, on the record’s same front-end, carries more unhinged Yeezy worship (peep the “ultralight beam” refrain), but mostly turns into what’s perhaps the most immediate and irresistible groove on the whole album.

By contrast, the feet-swinging and heavenly “Last Dance‘ at number five would stand the test of time as a Petri dish of how to finally get the exhilarating EDM/rap crossover right—in spite of all the many kitsch attempts out there. If you only source one tune off Self-Snitching, we implore you to make it this one. In a different vein, the following “Boomerang” brings all the funk to the fold, and then some. Whether intentional or not, BEZ’s delivery on the tune seems to harken back to an early BROCKHAMPTON-era Merlyn Wood flow. The defunct boy band’s influence is immeasurable and contains so many multitudes at this point, we wouldn’t be shocked to find out that some of its ethos might have bled into Jonah Swilley’s DAWs and record plates. In the same breath though, switch your ears and attention to “Propaganda“, and you’d be forgiven to think that you’re hearing Mach-Hommy spitball over a lost Bob Marley instrumental—all the while A$AP Rocky jabs loose ad-libs from the other side of the studio.

Yes, Revival Season is that left-field. Testing never seems to come at the expense of social consciousness or thematic poignancy, though. It’s evident that BEZ holds Philly’s finest The Roots’ Black Thought in the highest of regards, and nowhere is that inspiration more present than on the gorgeous penultimate track “Eyes Open“. Flat-out lead rap hit material. Speaking of which, Heavenly Recordings, the PIAS-distributed UK imprint earmarking Revival Season’s debut full length, must have struggled big time when combing through potential lead singles for this thing. As a matter of fact, none of those that ended up chosen as part of the official rollout in 2023 (“Chop“, “Everybody“, and “Pump“, featuring Shaheed Goodie on guest vocal duties), actually received any mention in this piece yet. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

What I came up listening to turned out to be so pivotal. I was in Georgia during the time of Dungeon Family coming up, and that turned out to be a big shifting point in hip-hop. We heard a lot of this stuff before the world, the way of thinking, the way of dress, the movement, the sound, we were there for it… Prior to that the South was really gated out, and as time has progressed it’s become more of a dominant sound, where almost everything in the genre comes from that time period and the sound and the attitude that was built there. All that stuff was on the back of really strong principles, on the back of the home-cooked, country-fied, soulful background that was added into the hip-hop formula from the South.

So the spitter-in-chief, with respect to how the duo continues to forge its singular sound. Since dropping Golden Age of Self-Snitching in February of last year, the outfit has further kept pushing the envelope by teasing new music—presumably leading up to their next yet-to-be-announcet exploit. Last summer they released the deliciously addictive standalone single “Dim Sum“, and followed it up later in October with a collab joint co-signed by Japan-born, Los Angeles-based alternative rapper Shamon Cassette, titled “WHITE HOUSE BLACK“. Since then, the USA and the Western world have, well, changed materially for the worst in too many ways. Revival Season are hereby officially being summoned to return to the scene, continuing to strike while the iron (and the planet) is hot.

Yet, outside of a one-off show scheduled in Oregon this summer, little is known about the 2025 plans of self-ascribed “non-religious rap entity“. In times of slim pickings, we’d be remiss not to resort to the clue in the band’s own name. More than ever before, there is no time like the present to reanimate spirits, re-mobilize civic action, and reclaim human rights. If it’s true that the coming together of Brandon Evans and Jonah Swilley was a “a divine appointment … [f]oreseen by oracles and foretold by angels”, then such protracted Godsend intervention is of the utmost urgency. After all, it’s no secret that B Easy and his DJ were religiously moulded by Georgia׳s slew of Pentecostal churches—if Self-Snitching is the deliverance right out of the gate, we can’t imagine how good the New Testament is going to sound. 2025 has got to be Revival Season.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV