Offie Mag

Houston-born, Los Angeles-based Brice Blanco has spent years developing a sound that pulls together introspection, psychedelia, rap, funk and a healthy disregard for genre boundaries. His music has also been shaped by a pretty serious reason to keep creating. At 17, Blanco survived a near-fatal asthma attack, cardiac arrest and a medically induced coma. What followed became the beginning of a much deeper relationship with music, one that has allowed him to process his life while constantly asking what comes next.

Now, that mindset has arrived at AFRO URF, his debut album for Future Gods.

That freedom is important to the album's relationship with Afrofuturism. Blanco isn't attempting to tick off a list of sounds that are supposed to make something Afrofuturist. In fact, there's a deliberate disconnect between the weight of the album's title and what you might expect to hear from it.

AFRO URF doesn't necessarily sound like what its name suggests. That's kind of the point.

Rather than treating lineage as something that needs to be preserved in exactly the same form, Blanco approaches it as permission to experiment. The artists who helped establish Afrofuturism weren't afraid to sound strange, take risks or head somewhere nobody had been before.

There's a lot of joy in that approach, too. Despite the experiences that initially pushed him towards music, AFRO URF isn't a trauma document. Blanco's past is part of the story, but it isn't the whole story. The album is much more interested in ancestry, curiosity, self-discovery and the simple act of being alive.

You can hear influences ranging from Sun Ra and vintage Kanye West to Earl Sweatshirt and Toro y Moi, but the album never settles comfortably inside any one of them. AFRO URF ultimately feels less like a statement about what Afrofuturism is supposed to be and more like an example of what it can still become.

Buy AFRO URF here.

Words by Louis Rowland