Days Before Rodeo Review

Owl Pharaoh is a rapper trying on costumes. This is the one that fits. Released free on SoundCloud with no label push behind it, the tape runs forty eight minutes and never stops moving. Mamacita drops Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan onto a beat that keeps threatening to fall over. Quintana and Backyard hit the same pitch of controlled panic. Drugs You Should Try It sits in the middle of all that noise as an acoustic guitar and a voice buried in reverb, and that song is the whole thesis, because nobody in trap in 2014 is putting a psychedelic ballad on a street tape.

The rap press called it an arrival at the time, and the retrospectives have not softened, which is unusual for a mixtape most listeners first heard through a browser tab. What holds it back is what holds back everything he does. The writing is atmosphere rather than content, a run of ad libs, brand names and threats delivered with enormous conviction and very little to grab once the beat stops.

He is a bandleader, not a writer, and he already knows it here. The 2024 reissue finally put it on streaming and confirmed the obvious: this is the record his audience actually loves, rawer and hungrier than anything that came after.