Contrary to what its title might suggest, Xperiment doesn’t exactly see rapper Ken Carson experimenting with his skull-rattling sound all that much. The rapper’s 2023 album A Great Chaos was sloppy and stupid in the best way, less arranged than rammed together, with Carson the glazed-eyed rapscalian at the center of it all. Like that album’s follow-up, last year’s More Chaos, Xperiment is another lateral movie: an hour’s worth of loud, bratty, brawny rage rap performed by someone who sounds amused by his own bad behavior.
The best moments on Xperiment are the ones that don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are. “Deaf Note,” for one, is a heap of gnarled noise featuring Playboi Carti, who slides in with a Future-lite croak at the halfway mark. The track is so badly mixed that its sheer ugliness becomes the whole appeal. Elsewhere, “Shopping” ranks as one of Carson and Destroy Lonely’s strongest collabs, with both rappers locked into the same puerile, exhilarating frequency.
“Wrist” slows the album’s tempo without softening the impact, letting Carson settle into a steady flow over a club-sized 808. Likewise, “Drug Kit” boasts a bright trap beat, though Young Thug’s phoned-in feature drags it down a bit. “Shadeson,” meanwhile, is the album’s nadir: It’s essentially a remix of 2hollis’s “Girl,” with 2hollis himself credited as a featured artist, and Carson sounding bored over a year-old beat. Carti makes a second appearance on goofy closer “Wedidit,” his pitch-shifted voice sounding drained of whatever menace it once possessed.
Carson admittedly remains a good fit for this kind of racket. He doesn’t need to be a great rapper in the traditional sense, and never has been; his appeal is in the snickers, vocal contortions, and dim-witted quotables with an impulsive, sneering energy. A typical Ken Carson bar, from “Flamethrower,” captures this petulant swagger in miniature: “I’m clutchin’ my stick and my balls, yeah, that’s all I got/Money, drugs, sex, yeah, I fornicate a lot.”
The problem is that this remains the only thing Carson does well, and for better or worse, Xperiment rarely tries to expand his toolkit. Every laugh, bark, and tossed-off flex, no matter how fleeting, registers as a petty little “fuck you.”
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