G.O.A.T.

Not every artist could take a bullet to the back of their head and make it work in their favor. In 2012, doctors told the Buffalo rapper Conway he might never walk again after surviving gunshots to his head and neck. He recovered, mostly, and although the injury left half his face paralyzed, he’s learned to use it to his advantage: It lends a distinctive slur to his authoritative rasp, and suggests an echo of a previous Eminem signee’s origin story. “OK, I get it, my face is twisted/But considerin’ my facial image, what nigga spit it the way I spit it?” Conway brags on G.O.A.T., his third and most substantial full-length project of 2017. It’s no throwaway; immediately following that line, he pauses his verse for a few bars to let listeners consider the question.

That G.O.A.T.’s title stands for grimiest, not greatest, of all time says as much about where Conway’s heart is at as does the album’s guest lineup. Features come mostly from New York warhorses like Raekwon, Lloyd Banks, Styles P, and the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy—veterans who have remained faithful to a ’90s ideal of hardcore rap, no matter how far out of fashion it’s fallen. Though he hasn’t been on the radar nearly as long as those guys, Conway is in his early-thirties, not all that much younger than them, and he’s fluent enough in the ways of throwback Mafioso rap that he could easily pass as their peer. Rapping in a ruthlessly methodical spray of violent images and internal rhyme, he sets out to upstage each of his guests, and more often than not succeeds. “Look, click clack, and this big ratchet I clap it/Six pack, I heard his ribs crack/And splash the wall with wig fragments,” he fires on the album’s opening verse. “Every day where I’m from, it’s yellow tapes and zip plastic.”

In interviews, Conway has talked a big game about representing his native Buffalo, a city that has never sired a genuine rap star of its own. Given Eminem’s mixed track record with protégés, local fans in Conway’s corner can be forgiven if they had mixed emotions when he and his brother Westside Gunn signed to Shady Records last year. Thankfully, if G.O.A.T. is any indication, this won’t be like the time Eminem signed Yelawolf only to A&R him into the trash bin. There isn’t a trace of Shady’s fingerprints on this one. If anything, the album could have benefited from a little more of Eminem’s promotional muscle. With little fanfare, it was dropped online just a few days before Christmas, a rare downtime for the internet, and it can’t be found on most of the major streaming services. For an album that Conway had talked up as his most accomplished work to date, its release has been strangely low-key.

It’s possible that was by design. Conway seems to understand he’s a niche artist, and shows little interest in wooing the unconverted. Save for a crackling, slow-burn Alchemist beat on “Trump,” one of the few tracks that bothers with a hook (the title refers to the verb, not the president), G.O.A.T. was produced entirely by Conway’s in-house producer Daringer, a ’90s devotee whose tastes tend toward the subdued. The producer seems to delight in period details: The Prodigy feature “Rodney Little” conjures the dizzying thump of RZA’s most extreme Liquid Swords creations, and Daringer offers a decent DJ Premier impression, scratches and all, on “Mandatory.” But unlike those legends’ beats, which packed a consistent element of surprise, Daringer’s can be static to the point of tedium. The wailing, one-bar loop on the Raekwon collaboration “Th3rd F” is almost tortuously repetitive. Conway seems to bank on the miscalculation that if the rapping is sharp enough, you don’t need showy production.

He boxes himself in by leaning this hard on vintage styles. Most of rap’s greatest works sprung less from homage than invention, yet Conway treats the genre the way many contemporary blues musicians do the blues—as an art that’s already been perfected, one that can be mastered and replicated but never improved upon. Conway has the talent to make real waves, and with Shady Records’ backing presumably the resources, too, but by limiting himself to these overmined sounds, he’s working under too low a ceiling.