Outsideness Expands Its Alternative Hip Hop World on New Album “...Then After?”
A cracked mirror can still catch the whole room if the light hits nasty enough. On ...Then After?, American act Outsideness take the outsider language introduced on ...From What? and kick it into a wider, stranger arena. The project, built around the collaboration between Freidrich$ and Azalias, has always carried that fascinating contradiction: music that sounds rough by design, emotional by instinct, and allergic to clean genre borders. This second album does not erase that identity; it stretches it until the seams start talking. Alternative hip hop remains the spine, but lofi folk, indie rock, skeletal R&B, strange pop, electronic percussion, and flashes of dance-minded experimentation keep breaking through the frame. What makes Outsideness interesting is not just that the music shifts styles. Plenty of records do that. The point here is how unstable the songs feel while still holding emotional gravity. Acoustic guitars turn into beat architecture. Intimate vocals get swallowed by bigger arrangements. A track can begin as a bedroom confession and end somewhere closer to warped experimental pop. Freidrich$ brings the raw construction, the odd angles, the refusal to make everything behave. Azalias brings continuity, melody, and a human center strong enough to keep the weirdness from floating away.
The album’s strongest passages come when its arrangements feel half-built and strangely alive, as though the listener is being invited to watch the scaffolding tremble. “Alright” opens the selected frame with melodic piano notes and slightly upbeat drums that lean into off-rhythm movement, while the emo-rap delivery sits roughly in the mix, almost as if clarity would ruin the confession. “Freedom” is the most complete architectural statement here: mellow acoustic guitar riffs, warm vocal interplay, and harmonies that give the track a floating, folk-tinted atmosphere before hip-hop drums and melancholic piano notes darken its edges. Freidrich$ and Azalias blend with uncommon ease on this song, creating a dream state that still has weight in its floorboards. “Even To Me” is messier but compelling, with mellow guitar, upbeat hip-hop drums, and Freidrich$ preserving an off-key rawness that feels deliberately exposed. Azalias enters with a gloomy sweetness, not correcting the imbalance but making it emotionally usable. By contrast, “Container” is the album’s clearest weak point among the highlighted songs. The hip-hop instrumental has interesting synthetic detail, but the vocal take and songwriting feel underdeveloped, leaving the track more like a sketch pinned to the wall than a finished room.
Still, Outsideness is often most interesting when it risks collapse. “Haunt” carries mellow acoustic melancholy and a nonchalant but emotional performance, framing loneliness through the direct ache of needing company and love. Its percussion feels somewhat unsteady, yet that looseness also connects it to a SoundCloud-era sensibility where imperfection can become atmosphere. “Got Me” continues in a similar emotional register, using tired, melancholic riffs and a detached performance that becomes intriguing because of its melodic instincts. The off-beat percussion seems intentional, a way of making the song resist ordinary balance. “Hold,” another standout, brings the album’s vocal chemistry back into sharper focus. Freidrich$ and Azalias move through emo and R&B-inflected phrasing with catchy ease, and the contrast between high, mid, and low vocal colors gives the arrangement real dimensionality. The remaining tracks, “La Jetee,” “Dance,” and “Water,” are better left as private corridors for listeners to enter without too much editorial signage.
As a whole, ...Then After? proves that Outsideness is not abandoning its first language; it is testing how far that language can bend before it becomes another dialect entirely. The album fits listeners who appreciate rough texture, genre mutation, and emotional pop forms that refuse conventional symmetry.
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