“The world’s legs are spread wide open,” Tommy Genesis told us earlier this year. “Everything good can come at you, but everything bad can come at you. You can put everything good out, but you can also put everything bad out really fast.”

If the sounds and atmosphere of her self-titled album are anything to go by, Tommy Genesis has found her own way, through music, to explore all that the universe can provide – its light and dark extremes; the greyscale cognitive dissonance in between.

From her public genesis as Tommy, it may have seemed like only shades of darkness befell the vision of the self-professed “fetish rapper.” After all, our collective conscious and unconscious view of fetishes, indulging our wildest sexual desires and the world of BDSM specifically, are usually bathed in a seedy red light, associated with a depressing underbelly of society and not joy or transcendence. Beyond dark-sounding beats and vocals that oscillate between dusky deadpan and flagellating lashes of rap verses, close listeners of Genesis might note an ecstatic feeling within them when listening to her music. At least, that’s how I felt listening to some of her earlier work on World Vision, released on Father’s Awful Records.

Since then, Tommy Genesis fans have had to cultivate relative patience in a world of never ending timelines and merch drops, let alone a world where it’s not too unusual for mainstream artists to put out multiple mixtapes or albums a year. She blessed us with a couple of singles in 2016 and 2017 to assure us she wasn’t going anywhere, and this year she made a splash with “100 Bad,” produced by Grammy-nominated G.O.O.D. music affiliate Charlie Heat, which later received a Charli XCX remix. And it was only just over a month ago, at the end of September, that she officially announced she’d be dropping an album with her new label Downtown Records.

Read full review here.