Album Review: The Internet Killed the Neighborhood by Marlon Craft
His self-funded fourth album turns a Wi-Fi-addled grievance into something worth grieving. Nobody with a label would have bankrolled it.
Manhattan Plaza, the Mitchell-Lama building on 42nd Street where jazz musicians and Off-Broadway actors have stacked on top of each other for decades, doesn’t mean in 2026 what it meant in 1990. The hallways still smell like somebody’s cooking, but the open mics dried up, the block got quieter, the kids who used to hoop at the courts scattered into boroughs they couldn’t afford either. That’s where Marlon Craft grew up—Hell’s Kitchen, born in ‘93, father a jazz drummer, mother a theater producer—and it’s the specific loss that fuels his fourth album, The Internet Killed the Neighborhood. He left Sony’s orbit back in 2020, launched a subscription community called The Center, and spent the better part of six years finishing this record on his own dime. No A&R notes. No marketing rollout. Just a 33-year-old rapper from subsidized housing who told DJBooth in 2018 that there’s nowhere left in New York for a young hip-hop artist to develop fans, and who decided to make a whole album about why.
His best writing comes at that claim from a half-dozen directions. On “Trust,” he drops it unequivocal:
“The internet killed the neighborhood
Nihilism leave you broken, but the paper’s good.”
On the title track, he ratchets the despair tighter. Every city of dreams became a city of memes, he says, dictated by a shitty regime, and people have been reduced to human load screens with nothing behind the buffering. He name-checks Wu-Tang on the interlude. It was about the money back when the Wu wrote “C.R.E.A.M.,” but now wealth is a smokescreen for a fear he can’t quite name. Then he asks what his role in the neighborhood even is when the gentrifier looks like him, a white guy from Hell’s Kitchen watching rents balloon around his own building. On “Analog Man,” over Havoc flipping Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” into something that creaks and heaves beneath the bars (the same sample he flipped for Mobb Deep’s “Down for You”), he says your favorite rapper would be snuggled up next to Elon on the rocket ship, leaving everybody for dead in the cockpit making TikToks. That’s a funny line, but it’s also probably true. He splits the difference between jokes and dread like that all record long, and neither one cancels the other out.
The relationship songs complicate the argument in a way he seems to know he can’t resolve. On “Together Sad,” he and his partner are stuck—she’s waiting for him to change, he’s waiting for her to grow, and neither one has moved. He calls her the only neighborhood he grows in, which means every time he fails to show up for her, he’s losing the one physical, close-quarters community he still has. He admits on “Shoulders” that he doesn’t trust himself to carry the weight, and it’s the most pared-down moment on the record. Just one verse, a hook, and nothing to hide behind. “Sedatives” puts the phone in the bed between them: he’s in London, trying to log out and be present with her, but temporary temptation and senseless sensation keep winning. He knows the internet is a drug to him, and he’s not pretending he’s beaten it.
Dan Edinberg and Kevin Theodore, who’ve been producing for Craft across multiple albums, give the LP a brassy, spacious bed that keeps the density of his writing from choking the songs. Robin Hannibal (the Danish half of Rhye and Quadron) co-produces “Together Sad” and “Most Days,” and his influence shows. The Havoc beat on “Analog Man” is the biggest swing on the album. Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” chopped into something that groans underneath five minutes of bars and a string quartet recorded in Mexico City, arranged by Sly5thAve, whose horns and flutes dot every track. On “The Neighborhood,” CARRTOONS, River Tiber, and The Kount pack so many moving parts into one track that it should collapse, but the beat morphs shape under the verses.
Craft talks to himself more on this album than he ever has, and the conversations aren’t flattering. On “Come Back Home,” the second verse is him calling himself a raggedy motherfucker for checking his phone for status, lonely and too scared to leave what he calls a cocoon of doom. On “If I Loved Me,” he says he’s a human being with human feelings and didn’t admit that until he was eighteen, and only because three rappers said he could. Then he turns to whoever’s young and listening and tells them they can, too. He’s aware the preachiness risks annoying people.
“Stop preaching, white boy
Nah, I’m just speaking, fam
For the first time in a long time, I ain’t gasping
I’m breathing, fam.”
That’s the closest he gets to addressing his own whiteness in hip-hop, and he’s smart enough to leave it unresolved. He told Billboard in 2019 that he thinks a lot about who he looks to as an example, that there are plenty of examples of how to be in the space the wrong way. On this album, he doesn’t grandstand about doing it the right way either. He just raps about what he sees and what he can’t stop doing, and the gap between those two things is what he’s actually rapping about, whether or not any given song admits it.
When the anxiety turns outward, Craft sharpens his aim. On “Find Me,” he names what’s wrong beyond his apartment walls with more precision than anywhere else on the record: guys getting lynched while we supply the chips, electoral bodies cancerously gerrymandered, privileged people giving answers over ice cream. He mentions hoping the Jets get a win while he’s writing about morality, and it’s the kind of line that would sound flippant from somebody else—from him, it sounds like the actual rhythm of his brain, bouncing between outrage and box scores. Then he says don’t pledge allegiance to him, and that the day he stops making words with his hands, you have permission to leave. “Unapologetic” goes the other direction entirely. He tells every rapper with a deluxe album that the regular version sucked, compares himself to Sotomayor in glowed-up kicks, and calls himself the GOAT in Wizard blue playing with his own money. The hook says, “This shit feel like Timbs in the summertime,” which is the only moment on the whole record where he sounds like he’s having pure, uncomplicated fun. He probably needed it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Together Man,” “The Neighborhood,” “Analog Man”