jarjarjr's Catch the Dusk is the Fourth Best album of 2024
How far would you go to create a total work of art, when the world wants you to be something else? Catch The Dusk twists the rules of music's zero-sum game – we must not let it be punished as a result.
Each year, Fourth Best recognises an Irish record that deserves a bigger place in the end-of-year conversation. It might not be the best album of the year. But it might be the fourth.
Catch The Dusk opens with a monologue. Strings swell, and jarjarjr opens proceedings.
“The most sensitive beings that I'm aware of, thrashing it out in the most violent of arenas.”
In the time since the album dropped: Drake, operating under the name Frozen Moments LLC, filed a pre-action discovery petition against Universal Music Group and Spotify on November 25th 2024. "Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game", Drake's filing tells the judge. "Every time a song 'breaks through', it means another artist does not."
It is extremely funny for the 17th-most-streamed artist in the world at time of writing to be the one making this point, in the direction of an alleged scheme to help out the 15th-most-streamed artist in the world no less. These are not the two artists in the world who's work sums to zero.
This morning, the world is ablaze with chatter about the breakthrough success of MOIO's tune "Moments". (It is, for the record, an excellent song.) The TikTok algorithm picked up the year-old tune seemingly at random, ran with it, and at the time I started this paragraph, it's sitting at a cool 3 million plays on Spotify. Everyone's talking about this as life-changing numbers; the kind of thing that will guarantee the start of a long and fruitful new career. But sitting right next to it with three mil of its own is jarjarjr's Forty Kal. The comparison is a bit laboured, mostly driven by the similarity in the numbers. MOIO's momentum is a lot higher right now; three million won't be its resting place; by the time I hit publish, it'll be, uh, four point nine. But what I'm trying to say is that both men, like Jordan Adetunji and others before them, have been hit by the lightning of viral success, and viral success is manic, unpredictable and fleeting. You can't gamble on it happening twice. As you'll soon come to see, those Spotify plays aren't the full story.
i’ll do it tomorrow
I personally have no strong feelings one way or the other about Jordan Adetunji, by the way. But Leo over at i'll do it tomorrow's writing on his breakthrough hit is essential. Give it a read!
I feel like jarjarjr feels some of this stepping up to the mic. He acknowledges recording a hip-hop album in this environment, that "most violent of arenas", is an endeavour that is a billion to one bet. He asks bluntly "Why do it at all? Why share any creation?". Why venture into the world of...
...Competitive self-analysis. Who can figure themselves out first, who can make the algorithm work, and who's willing to wear it all on their sleeve for the grand prize.
He names his motivation in self-discovery. In trying to walk the line between the all-consuming pursuit of art and the need to lead a meaningful life. Creating a document of himself that can be "frozen forever in time as a record entitled Catch The Dusk".
There's a bit of a journey to take before we get to this particular frozen moment. Let's look back to when he spelled it ｊａｒｊａｒｊｒ.
As I'd noted on the site in the past, years before he picked up the mic, typing his name out in fullwidth characters and posting hazey remixes of Nas, Biggie, Mos Def and MF DOOM on SoundCloud, the Corkman found himself bearing legend status, a small army of people making little anime edits of these tracks racking up millions of views. No joke, the patron saint of YouTube comment section stoners. Every 4/20 you'll see IG posts with the ambitions intro. There could be years-long gaps between a SoundCloud upload and its random pop-off in the YouTube recommendations columns. Either way, the comment sections saw him as the man with the Midas touch for sampling.
He wasn't exactly unheard of in his home country while all of this was going on either. In fact, his nickname Bubby Halz might jog your memory - his cut Bubby's Cream for Kojaque could well bear the weight of being one of the most important and influential singles in the entire history of Irish hip-hop. I'd previously mentioned on-site, during a scene report, the experience of hearing that song overseas for the first time. I don't know if we can say that he set the tone for jazzy, lo-fi hip-hop beats in Ireland; Kojaque had form with that style in early 2016, but I think the vision for Soft Boy Records, with ｊａｒｊａｒｊｒ in the roster, was forming around the same time. All I can say for certain is that he was there from the beginning of that wave, and at some point, he began taking an even more independent approach to how he handled the business side to his music.
As I'd previously stated on the site:
The first insights that he was completely barred out came in 2020 with a couple gigs around Cork and the pandemic-era double single Two Pin Plug. These two tracks revealed a diligent student of his inspirations, dropping dense, multi-syllabic rhymes with stone-faced confidence, and some of his best work in the background. These tracks came with the promise of a debut album.
He called it Catch The Dusk way back then, too, but while I enjoyed the double single, I didn't think he could be one of the best in the country until Song 50,000. That track was something I never would have predicted; over free-flowing instrumentation from jazz trio Five To Two, jarjar's dense technical lyricism flies. If we were ranking Irish rap feature verses, this is, I would argue, the undisputed number one. (but yes, Curtisy on Da Price #2) This track would give me something I didn't know I wanted. jarjarjr's world beyond the laptop, his lyrical talents in a more un-quantized world. I'd imagined this was a once-off for the Five To Two record, but I wonder if making this song changed the future of the album in a deeper way. This, is in many ways, the true origin of Catch The Dusk, more than Two Pin Plug was.
I'm not sure when ｊａｒｊａｒｊｒ became jarjarjr. Maybe it was when he picked up the mic, maybe it was after the tenth angry email to try to get a distribution service to spell it right.
During the pandemic days, the YouTube grails began to sneak their way onto streaming; borrowed verses removed, but beats still beloved. Hopefully they made Halz a bit of money – many of them got serious playlist coverage, running up their play counts. And yet...
During the inaugural fourth best talks in Cork, I talked about my fears about streaming - something I'd already covered on the site. I described my growing pessimism as a kind of "doomerism" - after the talk, jarjarjr asked me what I meant by that word exactly. I described my fear that the streaming platforms' support for Irish hip-hop was dead and gone, while the arrival of Spotify's "discovery mode" meant that exposure was now contingent on surrendering even more cash - 30% of your royalties back to the platform. Catch The Dusk was mere weeks away at that point (in fact, the original prospective release date had since passed), and it represented his biggest investment of time and energy into any artistic project. Five years of hard work. Some extremely high-effort, high-detail, maybe even high-budget music videos were in the tank. Graphic designers, animators, photographers, directors, musicians, engineers. For an artist that once thrived at home with the DAW, this is uncharted territory. On Instagram, he noted: "There were many times during this process where I fell out of love with music and the industry that surrounds it."
As I began writing about this album, Liz Pelly pulled back the curtain on a phenomenon that has haunted Spotify for years; the "fake artist" epidemic plaguing editorial playlists. Anonymous, mass-produced dreck creeping in. Long had we assumed that this was a reduced royalty rates play, but her reporting reveals the inner workings of this system, which they call Perfect Fit Content.
Liz Pelly
Some employees felt that those responsible for pushing the PFC strategy did not understand the musical traditions that were being affected by it. These higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop—music that tended to do well on playlists for relaxing, sleeping, or focusing [...] By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these were nearly entirely made up of PFC.
I got to thinking at one point writing this article that really isn't a review: Could I show that jarjarjr was robbed? The answer is I can't show you for sure; while I stand by the hypothesis that his niche of lo-fi was likely one of the first to be silently replaced with clones, we haven't yet found a smoking gun. (If you know of a larger data-set than the repository managed by spotifyplaylistarchive.com get in touch.)
With streaming becoming a harsher environment for artists like jarjarjr, the types of artists who are actually on the other side of the zero-sum game that Drake talked about at the beginning of the article, it's extremely telling then that Catch The Dusk is not a lo-fi hip-hop record.
The first surprise that Catch The Dusk brings is that it's all recorded with live instrumentation, in The Clinic, with eight other musicians from across the Irish jazz and neo-soul scene - solo artists including ZASKA, Chris Wong, Sam Healy and seasoned players like Ryan Hargadon (who played on last year's Fourth Best album pick....) and Louis Younge (better known for his killer work with Bricknasty and Sky Atlas). Then on top of that, three engineers. In an Instagram post that serves as the record's liner notes, jarjar notes the rush to get the vocal takes for twelve songs done in one day of studio time - the same for the drums. It's not a record that bought into anything that business or platforms or past audiences wanted him to be. It is not playing that game; it's his total work of art. Something that consumed years of life and effort - probably a fair bit of money too - in a day's exhalations.
I've made it 1800 words into this article and I've barely talked about how the thing sounds because I care about this record coming into the world, and in some regards, I feel like we failed him now that it's in here. As best as I can tell, the only year-end mention it got was in Nialler's excellent lists of Irish albums and songs of 2024, and despite his legacy, his deep links to the scene, the appreciation he gets from other artists, all the rest of it, sometimes it feels like this one fell out of time, not quite getting the momentum it deserved. I've seen some people call it "lo-fi hip-hop", the one thing that it isn't; this is studio fidelity with live energy. Tracks have massive, energetic horns, punctuating tracks with spontaneity. All of the players hit these tracks with pure passion. The same momentum in his voice is there as it was in Song 50,000. And there's also a sense that the story of how he got here is a lot of what he's about across the record. The same story he pointed to in the intro; why share any creation? On Split Tongues, he offers:
I crept through the cracks, kept it underground,
A laptop and some botched MIDI,
And touched hearts round the world out of Cork City.
Listen, the one negative thing I'll say about this record is that from time to time I have no clue what bro is saying. I'm not talking about the Cork accent, I'm well versed in that; I just mean that sometimes the lyrical knots he's tying are too dense for them to even register to me after repeat listens. A lot of it feels like it's not even meant to be understood by us; getting out of his head and onto the tape is his singular focus, streams of consciousness from the wheel of the Yaris. It's both enrapturing and at times infuriating; the record's greatest strengths might be jarjar's dense lyricism, evocative imagery and energetic delivery, but man; there's a lot going on here. Take this run from the album's killer lead single Sense The Beer Bought:
Adam looking at Eve he's trying to fathom what the game is
She gathered her traps and I ain't even caught the name yet
Blackadder glisten in the rain, tape hissing when you listen to my pain
I man the stove all night and get left with this gristle
I work the land my whole life with these hands and get pricked by this thistle
Fire off like a missile but I over shoot the mark
Still I chew the cud wear a smile play my part
Trust the eyes up above guide the matters of the heart
Navigate these staggered layers of snares and traps
With daggers bared it's unfair to ask who'd shoot first
It's a highlight of the album and the music video is an absolute delight, made with a lot of love and detail - referential to past productions with sampled records dotting the floor of the set, some impressive visual effects and a tight concept. And while at times I find the lyrical knots a bit too much to un-tie, the technical fluidity, the immense polish, the atmospheric boost that comes from the leap to recording in person - all points to a record that I believe deserved a lot more attention.
A couple months ago, I covered the music video for Last Call - one of the standouts from the record, a labour of love by three different animators under the direction of Brownsauce.
I ended up bumping into Brownsauce in a smoking area where he expressed a deep pride in the work. In the Instagram notes for the album, jarjar noted that "he made sure he got the lower proportion of the budget available" - which is what Brownsauce told me too. This was so much more about giving jarjarjr his flowers, being a part of something bigger, than just doing a video. That tune was one that jarjarjr initially thought was a bit weak, but was advocated for by the Clinic's engineer Cian Synnott; another Corkman, of course. This record is, ultimately, a story of community. It's bigger than any record label or any one group of friends or musicians - it sings the talents of hardworking artists up and down the country, mostly from Cork.
It comes down to this: the album is just a great listen. It's something singular in Irish hip-hop in the midst of what I really believe is probably the strongest year in Irish hip-hop. So why didn't it make a bigger splash? Here we have an artist who had everything - time, funding, phenomenal attention to detail, a pre-existing reputation not just at home but around the world, the beats, the bars, the unique selling points. Should we care about the numbers if jarjarjr achieved the thing he set out to do all along: his total work of art, frozen forever in time? All I can do is pass it along to you, and hope you pass it on to somebody else. It's a slower process than a viral hit or a playlist placement, but it's probably a lot more sustainable this way.
Bandcamp New & Notable May 28, 2021
Rob, put your lyrics on Genius and let me know if you want to drop some cassette tapes. Thanks for the music, and I hope you get to do this more often.
And to everyone else here reading Fourth Best - thank you for an incredible first year writing this silly little music blog. I've been enjoying putting together this little document of the community that I owe so much to. This website isn't just for the here and now, I really want it to stand as something to revisit in years from now, as the artists I write about grow and develop, and the scene itself moves ahead. I'm optimistic about us. Next year I'm going to be asking for press passes though. I'll try shoot some more interviews, I'll try getting some more video bits up, all the rest. If you want to know what my other favourite projects and songs of the year have been - ask about it on the Discord.
