Album Review: Shattered Glass by Daniel Son & Futurewave
Toronto’s most prolific underground duo keeps sending dispatches from the same frozen block. The consistency borders on unreasonable.
Labels out of the UK have been pressing Daniel Son and Futurewave’s vinyl for years, while their own city mostly writes about whatever Drake did last Tuesday. Toronto’s boom-bap underground gets cosigned internationally before anyone in the 416 picks up the phone, and Daniel Son has been blunt about the imbalance. He and Futurewave, the producer who records, mixes, and masters everything himself between shifts at a day job, have been filling that silence with full-lengths since Pressure Cooker in 2018. Shattered Glass is their latest, and it’s the first batch of all-new material since Son Tzu & the Wav.God came out through Daupe in 2022. Last year’s Baggage Claims reassembled seven-year-old leftovers, and this one doesn’t smell like a freezer.
Futurewave chops his samples the way that a man pulling film stock through a broken projector. On “Shipping Containers” and “Bear Steaks,” he lets his loops ride without drums, and Daniel Son’s delivery becomes the only percussive element, his syllables punching where a snare would. “Shotgun Draw” snaps back with a thick, blunt kick, and the contrast after those naked stretches gives the drums real weight. There’s grit in these mixes, the residue of late sessions and no outside engineer, and it suits what he’s saying. Futurewave doesn’t polish any of sounds other than getting the levels close enough and lets the dirt stay.
Daniel Son talks about moving product with the specificity of a dispatcher filing a shipping log. On “Shipping Containers,” he’s “at the airport bar with some Switzerland bankers” and the package is “crossing border in the shipping containers.” On “Ticket Sales,” he’s “tippin’ scales” and covering tracks so they “miss the trail.” “You gotta order more if you wanna pay less” is a wholesale principle flipped into a hook. He doesn’t slow down to explain any of it. On “Lil Earl,” he says if he had a twenty-dollar bill for every line on an opponent’s face, he’d “have enough to buy an island estate,” and then he’s back to the numbers.
“RIP my brother K, I pray you get to the gates.”
That line shows up on “Kolors On Queen,” squeezed between lines about cutting fish, dodging cops, and breezing through an airport. Death drops in the same way across the whole album—a bar or two, and then the song keeps going. On “Late for Dinner,” somebody might be late for dinner but not late to the bar, and a few lines later Daniel Son describes a man whose nose whistle “sound like a jazz flute playing symphony notes.” On “Bow Flesh,” he’s dreaming about K9s sniffing out packages and waking up in cold sweats, and the closer on that verse—“I seen the fear in friends, that’s why my heart’s cold now”—gets no special emphasis. It runs at the same temperature as the threat lines and the numbers talk. His dead brother, his bad nerves, his cold friendships all get filed under the same heading.
Asun Eastwood turns in the guest verse of the album on “Ticket Sales,” rattling off images of fox fur and Dre wool coats before dropping “this fox fur, let ‘em know a wolf skinned it” with the calm of someone who’s said worse at a kitchen table. His Brown Bag Money crewmate has a stiffer, more deliberate cadence than Daniel Son, and the two voices rub against each other on a Futurewave loop with no drums, nowhere to hide. Sayzee, from St. Catharines, brings a wilder energy to “Ocean Smock”—he’s comparing himself to Sidney Crosby in a face-off, claiming he’s “dropping every week like Epstein files,” and turning into Megatron inside the same sixteen bars. The sixteen is messier than anything Daniel Son would commit to, and the mismatch is useful; it makes Daniel Son’s own turn on the same song, where he scolds rappers for “only marking in his means,” feel tighter by proximity.
Every few songs, a line slips in that has nothing to do with the hustle. On the opener, Daniel Son confesses he “took some wrong steps that had to be corrected” and was “blind to the signs,” then tells off-brand rappers to pay up or shut up. On “Broke Routine,” he counts ghosts: “at the forks, I paved a road in between/so many ghosts that I seen.” On “Bow Flesh,” he prays for good days and prays for chaos to balance them. He forgets to ask his own questions, he admits. Probably the quick-witted thing on the album, and it’s buried in a verse where nobody’s going to pull it for a caption.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Shipping Containers,” “Ticket Sales,” “Bow Flesh”