Album Review: EXTRA CHEESE by NAHreally

The Massachusetts MC’s tenth release wrings a whole album from the pleasures and anxieties of being pretty good. Nobody rapping this candidly about mediocrity sounds this sharp.

Courtesy of Four Finger Distro.

Somewhere between Bandcamp and a desk job writing educational video scripts, NAHreally has spent ten years building a catalog almost nobody asked for. He started releasing tapes in 2016 under that name (TAPE, TAPE 2, all the way through TAPE 5) before switching to full self-produced albums during lockdown with Loose Around the Edges. His 2024 collaborative LP BLIP, produced by the Irish beatmaker The Expert and featuring Open Mike Eagle and Hemlock Ernst, got him the widest attention of his career, which still means a small circle of indie rap lifers and a few year-end list appearances. He followed it almost immediately with Secret Pancake, a nervous-energy dump he put out while waiting for BLIP to press. EXTRA CHEESE is his tenth release. He made every beat, wrote every bar, and rapped every word on it alone.

He built all the beats himself, and they’re warm and uncluttered, all jazz-soul compositions and soft drums that sit behind his voice without competing for attention. The tracks feel like they were made in a home studio at low volume, which they were. The loops are pleasant and a little dusty, closer to the Quasimoto records NAHreally cites as desert island picks than to anything polished. They don’t wow you. They give his words room to breathe, and his words are the reason to show up. No features means one voice for eleven songs. NAHreally’s writing is dense enough to fill the space without a guest verse breaking up the sameness.

The writing is funny, but not in the punchline-rapper tradition—the jokes come from paying close attention to his own life and finding the absurdity without exaggerating it. On “Moderately Well,” he calls himself “half man, half microplastics” and talks about looking dead on Zoom, backlit at his desk, buying Sprewells off East Bay, and reading Hermione’s name wrong as a kid. On “1010 WINS,” he says the only class of his you’ll ever be in is mammalia, that he spits the type of stuff you’ll only find in an appendix, footnote, or marginalia. “Umpteen” has him admitting he once found it unmasculine to wear sunscreen but now reapplies without reminders, that he’s his own MC, comptroller, and IT department, that he’s “cool, calm, collected, and losing my shit internally.” On “How We Always Gotta Be,” he claims he likes the finer things but not above eating a Lunchable, that someone cornered him about non-fungible tokens, that trends end and fads pass, God bless the gullible. The precision is the skill.

“I Need a Hobby” has an original premise few rappers would think to write about. NAHreally has rapped so long and gotten good enough that the activity has shifted from hobby to something with expectations attached, and he wants the feeling of starting fresh at something he might never improve at—knitting, cross-stitching, potato batteries, boats in a bottle. He lists alternatives with real enthusiasm before admitting none of them stick. He never plays video games, skips golf (but he’d like driving the cart), jogs but hates it, loves the NBA but got so jaded his team made a historic run, and he found ways to criticize it.

That back-and-forth between wanting to escape the grind and knowing you never will runs through “Kick in the Pants,” too, where he pegs his own potential as “borderline omnipotent” but concedes he’s on autopilot, that magnificence is around the corner if he’d just buckle down, but he doesn’t have the grit. He pins grit as a mythic quality everybody sells you on, but nobody can teach, and the voice inside your head that says there’s more you could be doing never shuts off for the reason that new targets materialize once you reach the old ones.

Midway through, the record gets heavier. “You’ve Got a Friend Type Beat” is plain about friendships shrinking with age—some fell, others stand strong, some exist only within razor-thin parameters of decreased circumference, and the hook just asks who’s got friends, how many do you have, and says he’ll appreciate them until the last one drifts away, disappears, or dies. It’s blunt and a little corny and works as NAHreally doesn’t try to make it anything grander than what it is. “Human Error” packs political frustration and personal ambivalence into the densest rhyme scheme on the record. He raps about commodified community and ruling class impunity and money in maximum disunity, wanting to turn hermit and spin Galt MacDermot records, switching to Prodigy and trying a “fuck it, we ball” policy but still feeling ambivalent about frivolity.

EXTRA CHEESE is named after a throwaway bar from a 2019 tape—“If I were making a pizza, I’d add some extra cheese”—and NAHreally has said the title reflects his acceptance that the character he’s built over a decade of rapping is, at bottom, a little cheesy. He’s self-deprecating and earnest and curious and calm, and those qualities don’t sell records, but they make good ones. The production stays in one gear; the instrumentals are sturdy backing for a writer who can hold your attention without a hook, a feature, or a gimmick. Ten releases into a career nobody’s watching, he’s rapping with nothing to prove and too much to say to stop.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Umpteen,” “I Need a Hobby,” “Human Error”