A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 5: Back to the Lab

A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 5: Back to the Lab

11/21/20

Very Smurt has always been a very interesting personality; one that had a definitive personality, fanbase, and style, but all of which were unique to him. His style had a lot to do with parodies of internet trends, memes, and popular songs, and some of his parodies were more subtle than others. His wide fanbase accepted his style to death, but overtime, Smurt himself did not. He grew tired of making the same kinds of music and the same album structure three times, and he knew he had to rebrand the Very Smurt name. On May 22nd, 2019, just over two weeks after his latest full-length album "Stanferd Dropout", Smurt teased something known then as "a new era". Nobody knew what this means until a trailer was released on Instagram and YouTube after the Kuricha Clan diss track. This trailer detailed the likes of an entirely new album set for the seemingly near future entitled "WOOb". This was shocking to fans, seeing as Very Smurt went against any titling constraints and philosophies his past albums had displayed. It played with capitalization and marked the album titles simply being strange sounds throughout the second era (the eras of Smurt were detailed in a recent blogpost). That same day an album cover was released. It was oddly simplistic; a darker pink background with teal writing in the bottom left corner and the holes in each letter had orange, pink, or red in them. It was everything surrounding this that led people to understand that "a new era" really did mean that big changes were going to come. This scared fans, while also intriguing them. The final major piece of marketing was a completed 18-song track list that played with capitals and title punctuation like no album had before. With all of these oddities added up, the album was set to be something very shocking; the question was whether it would be good or bad.

Listening to "WOOb" was like blindly stepping into the unknown for fans on July 19th, 2019. The album began with a somewhat eerie computerized vocal clip and a strange instrumental synth compilation to follow it. This led fans to think to themselves for a while about if Smurt had changed as radically as the album's first minute made it seem, but then the synth tracks were suddenly interrupted by a boom-bap drum kit. Over it was Very Smurt sounding just as good as ever in his introduction. The lyrics in this second section of the introduction were pretty average Smurt lyrics, but everything was still throwing fans off. The track ends with the following bars: "... I wanna show the real true me, so all of these ain't just .mp3's, they're .wav files". It was a funny joke that broke the tension upon hyping up this big and important change, and this is when many fans knew for sure that despite his new coat of paint, Smurt was back. We then received "Legend"; a song with non-stop back-to-back bars glazing the beat throughout. In fact, the only repeated bar in the entire three-minute song comes ten seconds before its closure as an outro. This track also goes over Smurt coming out as bisexual, which plays a decent-sized role in this album and a few projects to come. We then had our classic Very Smurt, Lil P, and Da Real Meme banger which has been appearing since "Jeanyus", and this one certainly did not disappoint. Next we had a song about poor service at a restaurant, and winning at Fortnite: a game Smurt has admittedly spent under three hours playing. The jokes were back but new, and many fans were still skeptical of this new style and direction Smurt was taking.

The rest of the tracks were all very interesting, but there are a select few worth detailing here. This entire album was pretty much chalk-full of interludes and smaller songs that never fulfilled what the many large rap songs did in "Stanferd Dropout". In Smurt's third album, we were given nine full-length rap songs consisting of a decent amount of bars and progression. In its successor "WOOb", however, we received only ten with the debatable inclusion of the 16-bar "I'M THE TRASHMAN". Mind you, "Stanferd Dropout" only had thirteen tracks, which made room for four interludes. "WOOb" had 18 tracks, which meant it had eight interludes. Nearly half of the entirety of this album were not the meaty rap tracks everyone had expected, and this made a decent portion of fans pretty mad. Due to these factors, the album didn't sell very well at all; contrasting "Stanferd Dropout" making Smurt's best-selling project yet. It contained a lot of hilarious jokes and moments, but it didn't have enough meat on its bones to satisfy fans for their Smurt fix for the two months. Alas, it was understandable due to what Smurt had to say on the project. In a late-July 2019 interview, he detailed the following: "This new album is a crazy thing, for sure, and you won't believe the direct contrast of backlash and praise I've received on my Twitter feed this month. It might have been risky as hell, sure, but sometimes you need to take risks to find new rewards. My music has been stuck in this stylistic lock for a while now and I just wanted my creative muscles to be free and spit whatever the hell I wanted on any given type of beat. "WOOb" may not have been what the people needed, but it was what Very Smurt needed."

Funny enough, this album was actually heavily rumored to be the end of Very Smurt. While he tried his best to hide this from the public, upon the release of "WOOb", Smurt was nearly out of Soundcloud minutes. Luckily, he did still jump into production of his next album quick as it only took two months and a day to release. Though, many are left wondering how things could have happened if "WOOb" really did end Very Smurt. It was clear that Smurt took the production of this album and style a lot more seriously, and he did practice a lot more in the genre he wanted to make eventually. This is the reason for the album's final track being called "In (Temporary) Conclusion...". Of course this could have just meant the album, but Smurt himself has said that it would have been an end to all of Smurt's music. In terms of what this album brought to the table, one could say a lot or a little. It's arguable in terms of the content amount and quality of what it provided directly, but for Smurt's future, it was a huge step forward. Some might say in a different direction than they would have preferred, but either way, it was a big and necessary change. What many fans of the old Smurt style probably didn't realize was that things would have gotten very stale if not for a change of pace. It's important that the artist decides themselves whether to change direction or not, and that's precisely what Very Smurt did. His music career was founded on the principles of going against expectations, hopes, and standards set by the trailblazers before him. The one undeniably true complaint pertaining to this album was that its style was very unrefined. This was later fixed in its successor "Olimo", but a lot of angry fans found this album to have a lot of missed opportunities and a waste of good ideas because of this one fault. Though, despite what you think of this album, Smurt had to tweak the formula, and he definitely did so in a surprising way that paved the way for his future music to shine.