Sewaside III

Mike Shabb has been a secret weapon in Montreal’s rap scene for years. Rather than turning out other staple sounds of the city—the danceable electro funk of Kaytranada or Planet Giza, the industrial and metal-tinged catharsis of Zambian transplant Backxwash—Shabb leans toward the new-age formalism of producer Nicholas Craven and rappers like Chung. He started out making trap around 2017, but he was also a fan of the classic boom-bap and airy, drumless loops that still define certain corners of underground hip-hop. After connecting with Griselda affiliate Craven, Shabb worked to refine his diverse sounds, dropping vibey turn-up joints like 2021’s Quarantine Flow and 2023’s Hood Olympics while doing ad hoc engineering for Boldy James and earning multiple beat placements on Westside Gunn’s 10.

Shabb has an ear for beguiling samples and knows how to work them into beats spacious enough for scenery-chewers like Estee Nack to stomp through. After the handsome and stripped-back production of Sewaside II, which emphasized boasts, koans, and confessions told through his slick Montreal slur, he reaches higher and digs deeper on this year’s Sewaside III. The beats are stranger, the guest list is more packed, and there even seem to be live instruments in the mix. Shabb goes grander without trying to fix what isn’t broken, letting gnarled tendrils grow out of an already solid foundation.

As a rapper, Shabb takes the lifestyle route, detailing his day-to-day in the 514. He isn’t concisely poetic like Boldy or a cartoonish bruiser like Gunn or Nack; depending on whether he’s slinging metaphors or simply storytelling, his croak of a voice oscillates between chill and despondent. Most of the time, he’s posted on the block and plotting out next moves while fear and regret linger in the margins. On “Grinchy,” where he’s masked up like MF DOOM and carrying a dog on him like Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a stray line sticks out from the warbling piano and betrays Shabb’s true feelings: “I keep my head high in situations I can’t cope.” That sentiment ripples under every moment on the album—from spliff tugs in the middle of shootouts where marks are running like Forrest Gump (“Free Cars”) to memorializing fallen friends and looking after their sons like Shep in Above the Rim (“Julie”). Fleeting moments of sadness prove that he’s only lowered the mask so much, and that intrigue keeps every vignette compelling.

But outside of any deeper readings, Shabb is here to rap while expanding the boundaries of his production. Sewaside III’s beats shift from woozy, Conductor Williams-style dirges to lusher arrangements that will have you second-guessing whether these are samples or live-band interpolations. Some songs, like the spellbinding “Free YSL,” split the difference between competing strategies while Shabb and New Jersey rapper Da$h trade war stories and scars. There are meat-and-potatoes rap tracks like the Lord Sko-featuring “Milk Crate,” loose interludes like “We Live in Montreal” that add regional kick-back flair, and peppy hype tracks like “Ben Wallace”; Shabb approaches each with style and finesse. Thirteen of the album’s 17 songs are entirely self-produced. He’s ambitious, but not so self-absorbed that he takes himself too seriously, giving even the more ponderous tracks a breezy pace.

Boasting the adventurousness and variety of a mixtape, Sewaside III is the most sprawling project in Shabb’s discography. On the penultimate track, “Free Jazz,” he yelps from inside a jazz-quartet whirlwind about the uncertainty of fame before a more sedate beat gives way to crooning about love and self-harm. It doesn’t quite have the focus and polish of his mentor Craven’s work, but he’s aiming for something bigger, more representative of his divergent tastes and thus slightly harder to categorize; he’s taking the hallmarks of traditional hip-hop and pushing them through filters attuned to Montreal’s cultural mix of jazz, dance, rap, and diasporic African influences. If this is what it sounds like for Mike Shabb to come into his own, he’s moving in the right direction.