Album Review: Onyx’! by Pink Siifu
Siifu enters this project carrying the weight of every shape-shift he’s made up until the sprawling world-building of Black’!Antique. Onyx’! arrives as the splintered afterimage of that last record.
A shape‑shifting rapper born in Alabama and raised between Birmingham and Cincinnati has spent the last decade refusing to sit still. After a run of records that moved from the soul and jazz excursions of 2018’s Ensley through the punk and free‑jazz fury of Negro and the Dungeon Family‑indebted collage of Gumbo’!, Pink Siifu marked his thirty–third birthday earlier this year with Black’!Antique, a record he had a chance to indulge the voices and textures that have been crowding his mind. Onyx’!, billed as a deluxe edition but essentially its own album, arrives ten months later with the same conviction. Siifu explained that the project extends the chaotic spirit of Black’!Antique with more fun and a darker melancholy. He called it a polish of the music that first sparked the idea and said the theme is “the shit I say to myself in the mirror.” It’s the latest twist in a journey that began when he was a child shuttling between two cities and learning about death and racism at family funerals and school breaks, and it continues his habit of pulling from soul, punk, jazz, and rap without settling on a single lane.
Raised in Cincinnati after moving there at age five and returning to Birmingham every school break, he grew up in a family that saw funerals as reunions and learned the reality of being Black through early encounters with loss and police harassment. That awareness of mortality and injustice feeds the work. In 2020’s Negro he channeled rage at America into bursts of hardcore punk and free jazz, insisting that the record was about the trauma that comes from the flag and that it is okay to be angry. Two years later, he used Gumbo’! to pay homage to the bass‑heavy, downtempo southern rap of Atlanta’s Dungeon Family and to stretch across generations of hip‑hop. When he celebrated his birthday with Black’!Antique this January, he dropped it on his own terms, but now he’s here with a deluxe, aka a new project to pick up those threads and pull them taut.
On first listen, Onyx’! can sound like a continuation of its predecessor’s maximalism. Thirteen tracks filled with voices, sirens, synths, and rhythms that shift every few bars. What keeps it from feeling like mere overflow is the way Siifu applies the chaos. A chaotic banger with “G CHECK’!” has the rawness of a freestyle but is anchored by glimpses of responsibility. Over a beat that lurches and snaps, he notes that strangers don’t ask for photos when he’s with his daughters, that he’s chasing money to make sure his family is safe, and that he wants his kids to see a father who is present. The bragging about fashion and cars shares space with concern about who might hit him when he steps out, and he boasts about getting whips only if the money keeps dancing. The volatility remains, but the stakes feel clearer. There’s exasperation in the way he snaps, “I can’t go with nobody that’s actin’ like a ho,” yet there’s also discipline: a recognition that not everything deserves his time.
Abroad, Siifu lets his humor and bravado roam. “Devil’s Advocate” and “EGM’!!” open the album with mocking chants of “Everybody gettin’ money over here/If you broke, stay your ass over there.” He tosses off couplets about broke haters and boastful lovers, peppers the verses with Funyuns and rugby metaphors, and laughs at his own absurdity. The track functions as a mood setter more than a narrative, as a chaotic house party where the jokes mask the hunger underneath. The follow‑up, “Nun+,” featuring Kal Banx, pushes the hedonistic energy further. He chants “none of that shit” like an incantation, swerving between credit‑card flexes and lines about being “fried as shit.” When he declares, “Hop out the black tint deep, that be a bad bitch, rich,” the cadence and repetition evoke a crowd hyping itself up. These tracks move fast and burn bright, but their reliance on repetition can make them feel like sketches rather than fully formed songs. The thrill comes from the flow, not the writing.
The project finds greater depth when Siifu slows down and lets paranoia and grief surface. “JET.EBONY” begins with a woozy confession—“I’m a catch a vibe, I just wanna get high… All these hoes know I’m the truth, I can’t tell no lie”—before erupting into a chant of “black chrome, black chrome, black chrome, black gold.” When he later admits that lust and money feel the same and that snakes smile in your face, possibly plotting to kill you on your birthday, the song shifts from flex to anxiety. The Black‑on‑Black imagery and references to chrome hearts and tinted cars are symbols of safety and camouflage. They also hint at mourning, with the repeated Blackness conjuring funerals that once served as family reunions.
That tension between bravado and vulnerability peaks on “RINKS’!” and “CRTX/VRTX.” On “RINKS’!” he skates across a beat that feels like another 808 trunk-slapper, comparing his grind to scratching a plate and laughing through lines about glitter on his face, snakes in his circle, and going medieval like Ving Rhames. The verse flips between swagger (“I’m Black on Black down to the grillz”) and cold realism (“Niggas is killers for real, shot over hundred lil’ bills”). When guest rapper Turich Benjy enters, he matches the energy but adds a subtle prayer: he talks to God like he’s speaking to himself and acknowledges that he’s barely honest even in prayer. It’s a small line, but it punctures the macho facade and raises the question of who is actually listening.
“CRTX/VRTX,” the penultimate track, is the album’s emotional core. ELUCID opens with elliptical images of holes in a hand, migratory patterns, and “stories that data couldn’t duplicate,” while billy woods follows with snapshots of a cab ride from LaGuardia, cigarettes in a bar, and kissin’ in Needle Park. These verses feel like dispatches from men who have survived long enough to see patterns repeat, weary but still observing. When Siifu arrives, his tone shifts. He raps about being out of the way, his kids trying to bring back a lost feeling, and the difficulty of staying balanced. He notes that at home he’s an antique, an artefact turning to dust, and he lists missed calls, his mother aging, his father holding on, and friends dying. The verse is a litany of losses and obligations, where he’s hustling more for the living, trying to adjust, watching perspectives deepen like Constantine on the road. He insists he wants to see his tears turn to gold and his sister’s pain transform, but he admits he’s stuck in his brain and misled by fake‑tough acts around him. The words feel less like rhymes than like a journal entry poured over a beat. The track’s loose, jazzy structure and the grainy piano and saxophone allow each rapper space to breathe; it’s one of the few moments where the album strains under the weight of its subject matter and emerges with clarity.
For all its moments of introspection, Onyx’! never quite reins in its restlessness. There are abrupt edits and unfinished ideas that can be exhilarating or frustrating. There are a select few songs that ride a hypnotic rhythm but spend most of their runtime repeating a phrase without deepening it, leaving the impression of a warm‑up exercise. Other verses feel more like placeholders, and the frequent references to designer clothes and expensive cars can blur together. Yet even the shallow moments serve a purpose: they mimic the sensory overload of Black life that Siifu has been documenting since Negro, where humor, sex, paranoia, and grief cohabit. The volatility that once felt like pure chaos now carries the weight of experience. He may still sound untethered, but the subjects he returns to—family, survival, betrayal, the afterlife—reveal a sense of purpose.
Siifu’s performance is also more controlled. He shifts tones without announcing them: one line, he’s a father who doesn’t want to take pictures with strangers, the next, he’s threatening to black out if someone messes with his kids. He can sound exhausted, amused, spiteful, and mournful within a single verse. The humor undercuts the darkness; the threats feel like defensive maneuvers rather than fantasies of violence. The production, credited to a rotating cast, benefits murky basslines, skittering percussion, and sudden shifts. The tracks have enough air to let Siifu try ideas without worrying about a conventional song structure, but they rarely feel like leftover stems.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “G CHECK’!,” “JET.EBONY,” “CRTX/VRTX”