EP Review: Manhunt by Boldy James & Rome Streetz
Two MCs this deep in their catalogs shouldn’t still be this sharp, but here they are, counting bricks. An EP of narcotics memoir pitched between boredom and fury.
Boldy James put out something close to eight or nine projects in 2025 alone. Murder During Drug Traffic with RichGains in January, Permanent Ink the same month, Token of Appreciation with Chuck Strangers in February, Conversational Pieces with Real Bad Man, Alphabet Highway with V Don, Hommage with Antt Beatz, and Late to My Own Funeral, Criminally Attached, and Salvation for the Wicked with Nicholas Craven (the latter with Ransom), dropping a week before this. Rome Streetz finished Trainspotting with Conductor Williams through Mass Appeal in May. Hatton Garden Holdup with Daringer came the year prior. Between the two of them, they have buried the underground in product. Manhunt opens with a skit sampling The Hateful Eight before either MC says a word. The question with a record dropped at this velocity by two artists this prolific is whether it amounts to anything beyond inventory.
It does, but only because both of them decide to actually say things on it. The lyrics across Manhunt are drug-trade memoir front to back, and neither Boldy nor Rome pretends otherwise. On “Hot Plate,” Boldy rattles off running off on plugs and stacking dirt on his palms with the energy of someone reading back a receipt. Rome enters the same track talking kilos and taxing, “Went from hand-to-hand to sellin’ bricks.” Boldy raps like a man who cooked his ten-thousandth deuce and stopped counting. Rome carries himself like the proof is still being demanded, and he’s happy to furnish it.
“Like Biggie Did” is where the EP gets past the ledger. Rome opens grinding through the dark internet, refusing sleep, “the sinner in Christians, now we eatin’ thousand-dollar dinners.” Boldy follows claiming he’s richer than he’s ever been, “keep at least 30 Pokémon in your Poké Ball” (meaning straps), life feels short but his wick is shorter. He keeps a relationship with God and a good lawyer in the same breath. Neither verse is confessional. Both are tallies of survival bent through faith they don’t fully trust.
Boldy gets his lone solo on “Cheat the Grind,” and he loads every bar with wordplay that never announces itself: red-dotting like a Hindu, “teach you how to pimp a butterfly, not let a butterfly pimp you,” his trigger finger itching. The Kendrick nod folds in without reverence or mockery. Every bar slides into the next with the weight of someone who’s been constructing verses this way for over a decade and can do it while half-asleep. That ease is both the gift and the limit. When the voice carries this much practiced indifference, you have to earn the moments where something punctures it, and on “Cheat the Grind,” the density of the craft itself is the puncture, even when the delivery won’t flinch.
“Tricky” runs at a different temperature entirely. Rome recounts collecting his total, going from the dirt to global, putting soul on Pro Tools, speeding in an AMG because of the wave he caught. Where Boldy subtracts emotion, Rome piles it on. On “Only One,” the two trade verses over a soul loop with a call-and-response hook punctuating each bar. Boldy ticks off trafficking details (importing, exporting, measuring with his eyeball) and Rome matches it: orange jumpsuits for court clothes, keeping yours closed if you get caught.
The title track is the sharpest thing here. Boldy references Martha Stewart and Martha Quest back-to-back, shadow boxes with his silhouette, says he worked a forklift because he played with so many bricks. The domesticity of those references makes the violence underneath them stranger, more granular. Rome closes the EP on his homie dying from the same product he was selling, and finishing on “most niggas ain’t got the drive.” That line hovers between elegy and recruitment pitch, and Rome doesn’t choose. He just says it, the chipmunk-soul bouncy trap loop still spinning underneath, and the EP cuts out.
Favorite Track(s): “Like Biggie Did,” “Only One,” “Man Hunt”