Album Review: I SHOULD BOOM YOU by NEMS & Ron Browz
The producer behind “Ether” and the self-proclaimed mayor of Coney Island team up for a boom-bap album that knows exactly how small it wants to be.
The first beat Ron Browz ever heard on the radio belonged to a dead man. He met Big L in 1998, played him some beats, and Big L picked one for “Ebonics.” The song came out on The Big Picture in 2000; Big L had been shot and killed on a Harlem street corner the year before. Browz was nineteen, and he kept making beats. Nas grabbed one of his instrumentals for “Ether” in 2001, and that story wrote itself: one of the most famous diss tracks in rap history running on a beat from a kid who didn’t even know it would be a diss track until he heard the finished song. Browz rode that credit for years, signed to Universal Motown, scored a top-40 hit with “Pop Champagne” in 2008, and then watched his planned debut get shelved after JAŸ-Z declared Auto-Tune dead. He’s been bouncing between production credits and one-off collaborations since, the “Ether” nickname following him around. Now he’s made a full album with NEMS, a Coney Island rapper with a battle record longer than most discographies and a “Bing Bong” catchphrase that briefly made him the most famous man on TikTok.
Browz holds up his end. The beats here are drums and loops, nothing else. The “P Anthem” sample flips Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Player’s Anthem” into something harder than the original, the melody buried under kick patterns that knock against your chest. “Kruger” runs a nightmare-movie hook over a beat that justifies the Freddy Krueger reference by leaving gaps everywhere, the drums arriving late. And “The Bar Exam” borrows Black Moon’s “How Many MC’s” beat whole (which is a flex and a risk, since you are inviting the listener to compare your verses to Buckshot’s). Browz doesn’t hide behind effects or layering. Every track is a room with the lights on.
NEMS won 25 straight battles on Fight Klub before he ever put out a mixtape, and the aggression hasn’t mellowed. On “First48,” he’s “by the hospital yelling, ‘Death to the victim’” in one bar and then he’s “in the suburbs looking for a new home after having a blick out at the school zone” a few lines later, a punchline so casually deranged it almost slides past. He references his Puerto Rican heritage constantly: he’s “the Puerto Rican Chris Wallace” on “The Bar Exam,” Boricuas call him “he the one” on “The Mush,” and “Bendición” uses the Spanish blessing as its title and hook. He says Alhamdulillah on “Here I Go,” his 2024 conversion to Islam sitting next to Coney Island block talk. Nobody explains anything to anybody; that’s how the identities share space on this record, and it works.
Lil’ Fame shows up on “Earl Manigault” and sounds exactly the way M.O.P. has sounded since 1996. “My shit more crack than Pookie at the Carter,” he spits, and then a few bars later: “A buck fifty from ear to mouth.” Fame has been doing this for three decades and has no interest in adjusting the formula. Papoose on “Here I Go” fires off bars about being “the nicest alive” and his gun being “fired so much it need to be employed,” a good enough line buried inside a verse that mostly runs on autopilot. Neither guest changes the album’s weather, and the whole thing sounds the same at track one as it does at track nine. That sameness is a choice that mostly pays off.
The one song where the bragging stops is “Nothing Gon’ Stop Me.” Browz’s verse drifts from a friend dying in a car crash to not knowing his father to AI taking over to Trump bringing in the troops, and none of it sounds planned. Then NEMS comes in:
“Every day I wake up mad, and I feel like I’m an earl
My stomach’s tied in knots, and my body’s in a curl
And I just got caught cheating, now it’s time to face my girl.”
The studio is booked, so he puts it into words, he says—can’t go back to jail, so the booth becomes the only room where any of this comes out. “That ain’t my therapist, nah, that’s my engineer.” But everywhere else on the album the mic is a weapon; here it’s a confessional window, and both rappers sound more comfortable on this side of it than they probably expected to.
Between songs, the phrase “I should fucking boom you” shows up in intros and outros, stitching the whole thing together the way a producer tag would on any other album. NEMS got sober in 2009 (he doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do anything), found Islam in 2024, and has been making mixtapes about shooting people for nearly twenty years straight. Browz taught himself to make beats and the first one he heard on the radio was for a dead man. Both of them are still here, still loud, still on the same block. “It’s nothing paying homage to the man who made Ebonics.”
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Nothing Gon’ Stop Me,” “Earl Manigault,” “The Bar Exam (Black Moon Remix)”