Album Review: SPOOKY: ACT I by TrigNO
A Columbus rapper with a decade of invisibility writes his darkest, most plotted-out album and dares you to sit through every story.
This review discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text at 988.
Columbus, Ohio has never had a clean runway for its rappers. The city produces them steadily, has for years, but the infrastructure stays local, the rooms small, the audiences tight enough to know each other by name. A rapper coming out of that circuit with a decade-long catalog and a community-first mentality is not unusual for Columbus but is functionally invisible everywhere else. TrigNO started as a krumper before picking up the mic sometime around 2015, and his earlier projects, TrigkNOw, Rawest 4M, Eyedentity, kept him locked into the city’s independent hip-hop orbit alongside producer Dev Draper and a tight circle of collaborators. Following a love record and a looser joint tape, SPOOKY: ACT I shares almost nothing with those projects in tone or weight. This one opens with a spoken-word parable about a town of ten thousand people awaiting death, where worry killed more than the reaper ever did. The parable sets terms that the next thirteen cuts keep their word.
Every line on “MadeMeThisWay” from the hook fingers a different external force for making TrigNO who he is: a cousin’s murder, a cheating partner, corporate indifference, religious hypocrisy, the world’s general evil. He calls it an “origin story of the villain.” Stock Marley’s guest spot fills in the backstory with hard details, an addicted mother, fake FUBU Christmas gifts, church gossip, and getting talked off a ledge. But the victim framing buckles almost as soon as the album puts it up. On “InDanger,” TrigNO admits he used to refuse judgment and now dishes it freely. On “chew my hand,” he’s the one who gave, built from scratch, handed over his network, fed people, and got nothing returned. Dev Draper’s verse on that same song reinforces the betrayal from the other side, people using kindness as a doorway and then treating the man who opened it like furniture.
The blame keeps bending back toward the person assigning it, and by the time “MyGod” arrives, whatever clean version of the villain origin was being constructed gets shredded. A recent college graduate, changed since his cousin got shot, rolls down on a block and fires. He lays low and numbs himself, watches the news, sees a name that looks familiar. His mother screams upstairs. His brother was killed in a drive-by. And the last line of the second verse flattens everything that came before it:
“The nigga that had killed my little brother was me.”
TrigNO spent several songs distributing blame outward, and “MyGod” collapses the distance between victim and perpetrator in a single bar. He’s both the protagonist and the casualty of his own villain story, and the album doesn’t offer him a way out of that.
Two complete narratives live inside “everybody can’t go,” and both would justify their own track. The first half recounts a coworker from the same hood who’s been embezzling, overcharging customers and pocketing the difference. TrigNO climbs to CFO, warns him, and the man won’t stop. So TrigNO starts a fight with him and gets him fired before the company catches the theft, saving the coworker from a prison sentence by sacrificing the friendship. The second half shifts entirely: from a relationship, a cross-country move she won’t join, one last night together, to a month later, she’s creeping with the neighbor. He packs for LA. She sends a positive pregnancy test. He raised the girl for nine years, and in the middle of a screaming match, she confessed that the daughter was never his.
Half the album is about who folds and who holds. On “EasyMoney,” TrigNO walks a drug operation from the first phone call to the interrogation room, and the second verse seats him in the back of a cruiser thinking about the kids he doesn’t have, the woman, his freedom. He folds: “Pass me the cigarette and juice on bro/Sorry, nigga, I’m tryna come home.” The outro stamps it (“If you ain’t built like that, you need to stay in the house”). “one day at a time” sits on the opposite side of that confinement, a letter to an incarcerated brother-figure who paid for TrigNO’s food and entry fees when they were krumping on different coasts, sleeping on park benches together. CHRIS.’s verse from behind bars, about dying every day when the GTL call concludes, about the hole left in the family being too big to swim across, is the most wrenching guest performance on the entire LP.
God shows up on nearly every song here, and the relationship with faith is never settled. A pastor distributes drug packs and asks for forgiveness on “MadeMeThisWay.” “Hell Won’t Free” says God won’t give you life twice. “ProverbsWoman,” the one calm stretch on the whole record, roots a love song in Proverbs 31 and lets N’shai Iman’s vocals hold the center. “A New Day” is where the praying and the dying crash into each other. TrigNO details his own suicide attempts with a specificity that borders on clinical. Slit wrists where the main vein missed, a cliff’s edge, an overdose where doctors pumped his stomach, a car crash, falling asleep in a running car in a closed garage until his wife found him, putting a gun to his head that jammed. Every attempt failed.
The latter stretch pivots toward the living, toward a woman who smiles big but wants to give up, toward “this world is a better place with you living in it.” The catalog is so blunt, so stacked, that the encouragement has to earn its way past the wreckage. It does, mostly on the strength of TrigNO refusing to pretend the turn was easy or guaranteed. By the closing track he’s writing like a man drafting a will, hoping he’ll look Christ in the eyes, hoping he has kids and marries before his parents die, praying he owns his masters, addressing his enemies and wishing them peace, speaking directly to his brother, his nephews and nieces, his cousins who have already died. The last bars end it all here:
“They gon’ love you better when you dead
They gon’ love you when you dead and gone.”
The writing across SPOOKY: ACT I is not flawless. TrigNO sometimes overpacks bars with more ideas than the rhythm can hold, and a handful of transitions between emotional registers land abruptly. Certain stretches lean on list-making when a more patient line would hit harder. These are rough edges on a project built with real conviction, though, and they come from a writer who has more to say than his pen can always contain. A rapper that almost nobody outside Columbus has heard of made something in 2026 that contains a murder twist, a paternity fraud, a snitch confession, survived multiple suicide attempts, and a goodbye letter. He didn’t have a deal while making it. He still doesn’t.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “everybody can’t go,” “MyGod,” “A New Day”