Album Review: Still Trying to Figure Me Out by Eddie Kaine & BhramaBull
A Bed-Stuy lifer on his tenth producer-paired record reframes the distance between his outside reception and his own account of himself as a working position.
Eddie Kaine opens his tenth producer-paired record by naming himself unfinished: “still tryna figure me out.” The phrase powers the refrain of the self-titled opener, returns as a self-directed line inside the third track, “Top of the World,” and reads from there forward as a border Kaine is keeping rather than a puzzle he’s asking you to solve. The Brooklyn rapper, who pressed his own CDs at sixteen and has put out a producer-paired full-length almost every year since 2021, has quietly decided that being hard to read in public is a position he holds on purpose. (Many rap albums that flirt with self-unknowing do it to pull the listener in closer; this one draws a fence.) He is not asking anyone to crack the code. He is telling you there isn’t one.
That fence has dollar signs painted on it. “Independent twelve years, never cared about a major deal,” Mani Coolin raps on “Don’t Think About It,” giving the indie-rap ethic one clean bar in his guest verse. Kaine himself says he’s staying sucker-free “in the spectacle era” on “Thieves” and calls out the class of rapper “selling out for them likes and streams.” BhramaBull, the Los Angeles producer credited on every beat, works from the same side of the board. His Bandcamp shelf is a rolling stack of rapper-paired records (two Street Purgatory tapes with Reek Osama, full-lengths with Rim and Monday Night) plus the Wire Transfer 7-inch from 2024 that put him on wax with Kaine and Reek Osama for the first time. Kaine has described his approach as playing tour guide for listeners through Brooklyn. He’s a working rapper who has stopped pretending the work is anything else.
Kaine names his losses by name. Verse one of “Pray for Me” puts a brother’s death in the third line:
“Lost my little brother, been a year, still ain’t clicks
Some shit just don’t make no sense, I’m steady just gettin’ bent
Blow smoke into the sky, hope my niggas takin’ a hit
Pour the bottle on the floor, just hopin’ you take a sip.”
Boom P. takes an RIP inside verse two of “Cups Up”; the outro adds tributes to Biggie Smalls and DJ Kay Slay (the Drama King). “Thieves” mourns Bushwick Bill and Tommy Strong in the same verse where Kaine writes himself free of the spectacle grid. A brother, a local OG, rap elders, scene predecessors, childhood attrition. Each mention lives inside a working verse. No song stops itself for observance. Grief runs through the record as regular traffic.
The writing on this record runs on homophones and puns and biographical specificity. “Pray for Me” has one of the sharpest couplets Kaine has ever written (“Had to realize the lies lie beneath the truth/Real eyes be seein’ through the real lies”). Whole careers have lived on a weaker play. “Cups Up” has its own “Paid in full, they say I money making Mitchin’/Been the king for a minute, Mitch Richmond.”
That bar folds a Mitchy Slick nod, a Sacramento Kings callback, and a verb-noun pun on “Mitchin” into ten syllables. Fakes on “Smoking Burner” get handled by a rapper who “slither like I’m Jake the Snake,” a Roberts-and-Eden pun perched on top of a Genesis allusion, neither one tapped too hard. The precision is in the verbs. Kaine’s flow stays mid-paced, talkative, writerly; faster delivery would let the wordplay fly past the ear, and Kaine wants you to hear every piece.
BhramaBull matches that pace. His samples run soul-heavy, his drums keep low in the mix, and on “Smoking Burner” he extends the chemistry of Wire Transfer to a full song. Reek Osama’s guest verse there, a West Adams Blood who talks about slipping into a Crip lady once in the blue and watching his OG cook rock in a light bulb, is the strongest feature on the record: specific, unbothered, indifferent to the distance between his Los Angeles and Kaine’s Brooklyn. The loop under him does half the work. Reek does all of his anyway.
Every flex Kaine writes on this tape drags a footnote behind it. “Top of the World” has a chorus claiming the title and a verse that lets the air back out (“rappin’ is my job,” “I’m here for the checks”). “TSA Talk” jumps from emptying Dutch Guts on Bed-Stuy stoops to Balenciaga sets and South Beach winter escapes, then pauses mid-verse for “I know what it look like, I’m just a rapper.” On “No Folding,” Brunson comparisons come with Jericho Sims benching jokes already sewn into the same bar. Why commit to the boast? Kaine knows the outside reading of his life was never going to match the inside one. He has stopped trying to close that distance and has moved into it.
The deepest piece of grief-writing on the album arrives, almost out of view, at the end of “Heart Hurtin.” Kaine simply talks through who he’s still got left: the game is worse than drugs right now, he says. He doesn’t speak to any of his childhood friends except two or three, about two or three niggas he grew up with he still talks to, and he’s eating, though, so he really can’t complain.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Still Trying to Figure Me Out,” “Heart Hurtin,” “Thieves”