Album Review: SANTO by New Saint
On the latest record, New Saint swings between triumph anthems and crisis confessions. The honest moments hit, while the formula blurs together.
Talking tough when you mean something else entirely has always been hip-hop’s most reliable trick. Armor polished until it shines like jewelry, protection worn so long the wearer forgets what it was guarding. The problem comes when the mask slips mid-verse, when the boast about being undefeated runs straight into an admission about hanging from the ceiling without the right distraction. SANTO keeps doing this—bragging and begging in the same breath, flipping from club talk to crisis talk without warning. Spliced news audio greets you at the door. The Titan submersible. 9/11. Israeli militants storming borders. Catastrophe turned wallpaper. Then New Saint asks for smoke, for isolation, for the world to leave him alone long enough to figure out if he even wants to stay in it.
He spends a lot of these songs explaining why God failed him and why he might fail himself. “THE BAD SLEEP WELL” goes hardest, calling out prosperity gospel with real venom. “We should have built God/He could feed all the people/Instead of building up mansions and calling them churches while the people in famine.” That anger lands because it’s earned, not performed. The hard-hitting beat helps the subject matter on how he grew up watching preachers collect while families went without, and the resentment curdles into bars about guillotines and regicide, lambs walking to slaughter for television. Right when the verse gets medieval, he snaps back to personal stakes. “I’m so fucking slept on it’s absurd/Think I’m about ready to explode.” His beef with the system crashes into his beef with being ignored. He wants systemic change and personal recognition at the same time, and the album never pretends those desires don’t contradict each other.
Stealing to eat doesn’t make you a crook. That’s the argument on “CROOKS N PREACHERS,” and he delivers it like somebody who lived the math. His grandmother still thinks he’s a dealer, and the beat is his only sanctioned drug now. But then the line that stops everything cold. “If it wasn’t for my ego, I’d be hanging from the ceiling/Rotting from the substance cause nobody comes to see me.” That statement sits in the middle of a song otherwise dedicated to winning. Call it armor. Call it the only reason he’s still breathing.
He buried his father in Alberta. Spent a month there, wasn’t sure he could recover. “PEACEOFMIND” names the loss when the rest of the album keeps it underground. Fatherless shame runs through earlier tracks as subtext, but this one brings receipts. He spent too much time medicated afterward, sitting with doubt until he decided he was done suffering. “I’d never want my son growin’ up without his daddy” hits different when you know the absence he’s referencing. Grief pivots to resolution without forcing catharsis. He comes off tired, not healed.
Paranoia runs parallel to the spiritual material. Over breakbeat drums and fuzzy synth bass, “BACKBITE” catches him driving Mulholland with thirty-twenty vision, watching somebody slip a pill into a drink, praying God tells him he’s the only one getting played like this. “Lord, I prayed I hope He’d tell me I’m the only one/‘Cause if He’d do that shit with me He’d pull it with just anyone.” Underneath the suspicion sits plain insecurity. His circle burned him before, and he won’t forget it.
Friends declared dead to him. Sex on drugs because sober intimacy doesn’t compute. Self-sabotage while waiting for applause that never arrives. “WHO GOT ME?” takes the unease somewhere worse, and the outro goes where most rap records won’t follow. “If you ever kill me, use a shotgun/Shoot me in the back/Please make my adrenal glands explode/If I’m not dead, let me enjoy a single minute of peace/A peace I’ve never known.” Instructions for his own murder, delivered flat, requesting the adrenaline rush of dying before the brain can analyze it. That’s a man telling you exactly what loops through his head at three in the morning.
Drinking to get over someone while losing other women in the process. “Tryna make you mad I’m petty” is the hook on “P.E.T.T.Y.,” but the verses reveal somebody who can’t stop running the scoreboard on a game he already lost. Same volatility on “FONTANA.” He accuses an ex of inflated streams, calls her painfully average, then admits he’s invisible and can’t shake the delirium when he dreams. Every insult confesses how much he still cares.
SANTO staggers between anthems and spirals. “SURGE” and “428DAYSLATER” go full triumphant independent rap, built with bare hands, sleeping on streets before pulling Phantoms. But even the triumph gets interrupted. “Fuck a self made trillionaire/All the folks crying out here barely paying rent” shows up in the middle of a flex, a reminder that his wins don’t cancel the losses piling up around everyone else. On “KONTROL,” he wonders why he craves control when his own life spins off-axis. Pills open, grandmom unable to reach him, baby born early while he’s scrolling through the internet looking for friends who stopped calling.
Anxiety spiked, seeing angels, dreaming of Lisbon. “NECK BROKE OUTRO” ends the album with begging and pleading in equal measure, wanting love to sustain him when nothing else will. “I been longing for a love/Like if love could sustain me.” All that bravado evaporates. What’s left is a man hoping heaven exists because the alternative terrifies him.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “THE BAD SLEEP WELL,” “WHO GOT ME?,” “PEACEOFMIND”