Get Used To It doesn’t necessarily have a strong thematic arc to its musical core, but KayCyy’s diverse skill set offers more than enough reason to stay tuned for his upcoming studio debut.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what KayCyy (spelled exactly as is) is going for on Get Used To It (a mixtape meant to hold over fans before his upcoming studio debut), and, for the most part, that’s a good thing. At least, in KayCyy’s hands, this becomes a good thing. In fact, he’s such a good songwriter — and ghostwriter, with his hands all over Ye’s Donda — that he can of course make it a good thing. There’s an immediacy to the songcraft here — and brevity, as the poppy tracks reliably clock in around three minutes and hit the chorus at least twice — that registers no matter how aggressive things get. Sure, it’s easy to point to the influences that have gone into the general sensibilities of these tracks — lo-fi, 2017-era Playboi Carti can be heard all over “Replay” and “Borrow,” with the latter even copying his deadened delivery across the chorus and verse — but the arc that KayCyy is able to assemble from these reference points is far more telling than the mere presence of such qualities.
Which, to be fair, there are plenty of, like the pulsating, massive see-sawing bassline of “Replay,” where KayCyy’s vocals repeatedly croak out the demand “give me more, not less,” before then asserting “I bet I do numbers, let’s bet, yeah.” His first verse that follows this is jagged, often monosyllabic with wordplay, and baby-voiced in his cadence (“Woah, wow, I know she gon’ geek”); the second is more melodic, smoother, carries an actual rhythm, and ends with an unfounded declaration that he’s the year’s hottest rookie. It’s a monster of a song, preceded by opener “Look What I Found,” which features a progressive midsection beat switch-up that announces guest Lancey Foux with a full orchestra; “Shoutouts” follows both, with a stammering, bouncy beat that KayCyy playfully propels his voice off of as he honors his immediate family (he makes the humorous aside that he “put my granny in a Wraith” but that “uh, she don’t even know what it is”) before hitting a chorus built around him stretching out the “-en” in “told ’em it was written.” A little later, on “Howwww” (again, spelled exactly as is), he laments about how he wouldn’t be mad “if a stranger fuck my bitch… / ’cause I don’t know him,” as opposed to if a friend did it instead. It’s in the details.
But while KayCyy largely operates in a vaguely hip-hop-oriented space throughout the majority of Get Used To It’s brief 27-minute length, there’s an even briefer stretch in the middle (two songs, to be exact) where he slows things down even further with a pair of neo-soul ballads that suggest his eclectic talents might stretch even further. “Hold You Up” and “Rain,” the latter of which features 070 Shake and Daniel Caesar, gift the mixtape with an earthy, almost sensual middle-ground of sorts that feels like a transitional space between the project’s bombastic opening and mellowed closing. And while there isn’t really much of a thematic arc to the music as a whole, KayCyy’s diverse skill set provides enough of a reason to stick around; he really does make you wanna know what’s going to happen next, which, at this point, seems almost limitless.
Published as part of Album Roundup — June 2022 | Part 2.
