Porter Ray

Watercolour

Seattle MC’s debut blends reflective lyrical brushstrokes with woozy sonic refractions.

PORTER RAY reinvented himself in rhyme. A high school dropout, whose life unravelled after the deaths of his lawyer father and younger brother, Ray found rapping a welcome way to salve the pain after Shabazz Palaces’ don dada Ishmael Butler recognised his gifts. A natural storyteller, Ray unleashed a series of vivid mixtape portraits of his locale’s druggy highs and lows that painted him as a new school Nas with the lyrical slickness of Roc Marciano. The street-wise intellect certainly lets his slightly off-pitched voice do most of the heavy lifting over the stuttering spacey synthetics, phased keys and warped Rhodes of B-Roc’s atmospheric production. And if Ray is acutely on-trend when his mother’s voice suddenly surfaces late on, eulogising his brainpower, it’s safe to say she probably knows best.