Since the release of Isaiah Rashad's The Sun's Tirade in 2016, the rap landscape has warped like never before, yet on his third album, The House Is Burning, it's like the rapper has just woken up from a long hibernation. THIB is, for the most part, like settling back into a warm armchair, a replication of the layered vocals, sun-touched beats, and woozy atmospheres that characterized Rashad's mid-2010s arrival. Yet as the album unfolds, new directions become apparent: THIB is not only marked with a breezy openness that its predecessor lacked but stamped firmly with the sounds of the American South. "Lay Wit Ya" is the most overt ambassador, with an echoing Three 6 Mafia sample and guest appearance from crunk revivalist Duke Deuce, but regular interpolations and reproductions of the OG Memphis style soon provide a refreshing addition to Zay’s catalog.
The other significant change on THIB comes with Rashad himself: where Cilvia Demo and The Sun’s Tirade pitched the rapper as the headline act, on THIB he feels fundamentally out of reach, clouded in vocal effects and mumbly verses. It’s not an entirely new direction -- 2016’s “Bday” offered an early blueprint -- but over the length of a full project, it proves difficult to balance. On tracks like "Darkseid" and “All Herb,” it gives his darker undercurrents extra gravity, his demons hovering in the corners of every verse. Yet in the album’s brasher material, it proves a sheer energy-sapper: on “9-3 Freestyle” the rapper delivers rampant hedonism with a lethargic drawl, while “Wat U Sed” pauses its vibe-heavy verses for a sleepy, barely audible interpolation of the classic “Bunny Hop.”
These two new directions prove an obvious mismatch -- Rashad's muffled vocals are perfect for intimate soundscapes, while Southern production is built around larger-than-life verses -- so balancing them proves instrumental to the album's success. For the most part, the rapper thrives on compromise, folding Southern flair into his laid-back formula on tracks like "Headshots" and "RIP Young." But unfortunately, the album's best moments come when one side concedes: the small-scale keys of "THIB" prove a natural companion to Zay's languid vocals, while the rapper returns to a bold delivery for the wistful, open-road production of "HB2U." While THIB is a back-to-front vibe and an intriguing experiment for Zay's mellowed-out sound, it's one that's still negotiating its own limits.