Larry June’s fashion couldn’t be extra simple: Aspirational flex raps and checklisted wellness routines delivered with such serenity, it’s like he’s a strolling valium tablet. It’s an adaptable strategy: Whether or not he’s gracing his trademark West Coast post-hyphy beats, dreamy disco-pop, or velour pattern loops, he hardly ever sounds misplaced. He’s in a position to flex this versatility with the hyper-malleable Texas producer Cardo, with whom he’s made 5 tasks within the final 4 years. Not like June’s work with manufacturing duo LNDN DRGS or the Alchemist, which are inclined to marinate in a single sound for a whole mission, his team-ups with Cardo boast extra song-to-song selection. The Night time Shift, their fifth album, maintains that spirit with heat and sultry beats to cruise to.

Cardo has produced stadium-ready megahits for Travis Scott and Drake, contemplative ballads for Kendrick Lamar, and frenetic beats for Pi’erre Bourne and Child Keem, all of that are tied collectively by an enveloping sense of scale. The most effective Cardo beats are the epitome of encompass sound, touchdown round you want a dome. On earlier collaborations, Cardo gravitated in the direction of the wavy rhythms of hyphy; The Night time Shift roughly sticks to that script, with lush, swinging rhythms on tracks like “Chops on the Blade” and “Pop Out.” June’s mellow confidence usually retains issues from getting boring, however his boasts can generally go from charmingly primary to eye-rollingly cliche. Take the primary verse of “Glasshouse Knockin’,” which sounds prefer it was penned throughout one in every of his many inventory portfolio conferences: “My numbers is totally different, my hoes is sensible/My snow Sicillian, I’m countin’ 1,000,000” he says, a state of affairs we’ve heard him describe a whole bunch of occasions earlier than.

Cardo’s hyphy work is clean—the distorted swing of ”GRGP” evokes Bay Space legend Too $hort and Detroit road rapper Peezy to get free, and when Cardo pushes June offshore musically, issues perk up. Early spotlight “Ocean Delicacies” mixes a string pattern and tinny hi-hats with a bouncing drum line as June plots to fill his storage with a number of totally different sorts of coupes. It’s peppy with out knocking June out of his BPM consolation zone, and sufficient to offer visitor 2 Chainz room to run off with one in every of his most memorable options in a minute (“Informed him it was chess, not checkers, like an A-cup”). “Love of Cash” retains up this momentum with jazzy saxophone and booming 808s that might soundtrack an evening a a 5-star Michelin restaurant. The proper beat will make even probably the most cliche Larry June bars sound first-time contemporary.

Like his Bay Space forebears $hort and E-40 earlier than him, June has constructed a legacy on reliable homegrown life-style raps. And whereas The Night time Shift doesn’t include something too shocking, his music with Cardo stays among the many most fluid and enjoyable in his catalog. The pleasure in a physique of labor like The Night time Shift comes from its configurations, the fixed tinkering that may unearth new dimensions inside a traditional components.