Lil Ugly Mane returns as the ugly duckling of the underground on "headboard"
Matty takes a brief look at the new track from Lil Ugly Mane.
by Matty Monroe
In the initial Soundcloud Rap class of the early 2010s, Travis Miller was, no pun intended, the ugly duckling. While his initial offerings as Lil Ugly Mane fit in well with the scene, he quickly diverged from the path many of its young stars had taken and divulged in the influences of the punk & noise scenes he originally was a part of, with his songs growing longer, darker, and increasingly personal. On "headboard", his first song released under the Lil Ugly Name in several years (though, this track was originally credited to Bedwetter but seems to have been retroactively credited to Lil Ugly Mane), and his first solo music since 2017's volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present as Bedwetter, the more abstract & venomous aspects of that album have been plucked out, but that doesn't mean there's no bite to what Miller is doing.
On his new track, it feels like Miller is creating some new, mutated form of trip hop & emo rap based around the groundwork of grunge, nu metal and even shoegaze, as a mixture of live/sampled drums fit in with heavy guitar riffs and new age synths, all in service of Miller's disaffected vocal performance, with the exception being his occasional vocal bubblegum harmonies that pop out throughout the track, as the track seemingly pushes you to the opposite ends of the pop spectrum all these genres had at one point. And just as you begin to get comfortable in this hodgepodge Miller has created, the layers begin to drop out, the track begins to skip like it's being spun on a faulty CD player, and you're left skipping to the start, hoping the next time around it'll be an endless loop.