Mafia, what else: ranking every Boldy James album.
Honorable Mention: Adu (2023)
Boldy Bad Man (apparently this is their moniker now?) is back at it, and the results are excellent as usual. Only 6 songs long and under 20 minutes in length, this deft, melodic mixtape is a top-notch snapshot of the duo’s powers, and a reassurance that—after over a dozen releases in the past 3 years—Boldy’s still got the magic. On “Sweetest Taboo,” Boldy and guest artist Larry June drop quick, dextrous verses over a well-placed Sade sample and high-energy drums, while “Give Or Take” uses a wistful alt-R&B sample to add emotional heft to Boldy’s bitter kiss-off to an ex-associate. As usual, Boldy’s pen is razor-sharp, and lines like “Still slapping on the Mile off of Seven-Tel / Get you flipped quick as a coin but ain’t no heads or tails” only prove he’s not willing to let his imperial phase die yet. It’s an excellent mid-game release, and a reminder that even though it feels like he’s been around forever, Boldy’s mainstream career is still pretty young. It’s going to be a good year.
Dishonorable Mention: The Versace Tape (2020)
Technically, this is a mixtape, but given that Boldy dropped it during his meteoric 2020 rise, I figured that it was worth mentioning. It’s not great. It’s not Boldy’s fault—he does his best, especially after having already dropped two masterpieces in the same year—his raps just don’t mesh well with Jay Versace’s production, which often ends up being a little too mellow. Combine Versace’s drumless, ambient loops with Boldy’s chilled-out flow and you have an album that often ends up being too much of a snooze to be enjoyable.
11. Indiana Jones (2023)
What would it sound like if Boldy James went trap? I still can’t really tell you. After multiple listens to Indiana Jones, I’m still struggling to remember anything that stuck with me. It’s like one of those calculus proofs that you just stare at and then realize an hour has passed. This is the only album Boldy’s put out that’s genuinely bad (which is a testament to the strength of his catalog), but it really is bad. The lyrics are forgettable, the beats are uninspired, and while there are highlights (albeit not all that many), they pretty much all come from people who aren’t Boldy. To be fair, I could probably forgive this one if it wasn’t almost an hour long. Don’t listen to it.
10. Be That As It May (2022)
Three minutes into Be That As It May, Boldy James and Cuns drop a genuine party track—quite possibly the first one of Boldy’s career. Over a chintzy guitar and piano loop that sounds like a cross between yacht rock and ‘90s R&B, Boldy brags about a successful job in a laid-back drawl, sounding more like Danny Ocean than his usual scarred, street-samurai persona. The punchlines are ridiculous (“pot whippin’ them big birds, Kentucky Fried Chicken,” “it’s all kinds of fish the in the sea, but we the ones who eat piranhas,” “you see me in a fight with a grizzly, n*gga, don’t help me help the bear,” I could keep going). It’s a rare character break—a gloriously campy, turn-it-up banger—and I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the best songs in his catalog (and if you wanted to argue that it’s the best song he’s got, I wouldn’t fight you).
I’ve devoted a whole paragraph to this song because nothing else on Be That As It May is worth talking about. “Foot Prints” tries to match the manic insanity of “Earned Not Given,” but with mostly diminishing returns (that being said, “footprints in the sand, my Jesus walk with me” is gold). Most of the other tracks only end up reminding you of better songs on other albums. Even when Boldy drops a memorable line (“I run with more ex-cons than Genghis”), the generic production brings it down. “God Speed” almost manages to tap into something great – “I fuck around and get indicted for embezzlement/you just another lawsuit n*gga with a settlement” has the ring of classic Boldy, and its eerie electronica beat is genuinely ear-catching—but it can’t save the latter half of the album’s overall dullness.
The album ends with “Closure,” a 35-second fever dream in which a murder takes place over a bleak, tense piano melody. It legitimately sounds like something out of a horror movie, and, even if Boldy doesn’t say a word on it, it’ll probably manage to stick with you. And that’s the worst part of Be That As It May. Cuns clearly has a style, even if he doesn’t know what it is, and if he’d taken more risks and pushed Boldy further out of his element, then the results might have been great. Instead, he plays it safe the whole time. There’s nothing truly terrible on Be That As It May, but you’re not going to come back to it after that first listen… and that’s the worst part.
9. Mr. Ten08 (2022)
Disclaimer: Mr. Ten08 is pretty good. Boldy’s got one of those catalogs where everything’s pretty good, really, even if not all of it’s great, so it gets a bit complicated when it comes to ranking it. Mr.Ten08 might fall pretty low down on this list, but it’s still a solid album with a lot to offer (barring Indiana Jones, all the other albums on this list are solid listens). The main draw of Mr. Ten08 is Futurewave’s production, which submerges Boldy’s drawl under a quiet, ominous haze of minor-key ambience. The results are mixed—at times, the production can cross the line from tastefully understated to simply boring—but generally, it’s got more highlights. A clear standout is “Disco Fever,” where low, menacing piano chords emphasize the song’s sunglasses-at-night feel, accentuated by lyrical displays like “Eight hundred gram bust Cuban, twenty-four carat white gold / Old school runnin’ on turbo blue, but I’m bustin’ nitros.” Similarly, the ethereal strings on “Could Be Worse” evoke Sky Ferreira, or maybe the entire Italians Do It Better roster.
Aside from the appearance of fellow Detroit street rapper 2100 Bagz, who lends his dry rasp to the chorus of “Dormin’s,” Mr. Ten08’s a pretty strict solo joint. By the time November had rolled around, Boldy had already dropped two solid albums that year, and it’s easy to see Mr. Ten08 as more of a way to stay busy than anything else. In 2022, Boldy didn’t really need to do anything to cement his legacy, and it would have been unlikely that anything he put out could have matched the highs of his best work. Mr. Ten08 works in that it ignores that legacy for the most part, demanding to be taken on its own terms. In keeping with his record of finishing strong, Boldy drops this gem on album closer “Indivisible:” “Amen, and I be goddamned / Lord don’t let these streets eat me alive and swallow me.” Mr. Ten08 might be more for Boldy than it is for any of us, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Check it out.
8. Super Tecmo Bo (2021)
What do you do when you’re on top of the world? For Boldy and Alchemist, the answer was to go small. After winning over the hearts of the critics with the warped psychedelia of Bo Jackson that summer, the duo waited until the very end of 2021 to release Super Tecmo Bo, a decidedly more low-key affair. The beats mostly consist of jazz and electronic loops—Boldy’s bread and butter—and while his lyrics aren’t groundbreaking, Boldy spins his classic yarns of crack deals and street rivalries with his usual charisma. Most of the songs are single-verse vignettes of street life. On “300 Fences,” Boldy’s forgetting his keys turns a visit to his dad’s into a slapstick crime comedy where he has to hide his pills after his neighbor witnesses him break into his own house and calls the cops. “Hot Water Tank” is about (you guessed it!) Boldy and his associate ICECOLDBISHOP finding themselves under heat when they try to buy a hot water tank.
Super Tecmo Bo is much less intense than Boldy’s previous projects, and of all his albums it’s probably the one that’s easiest to just throw on. That doesn’t stop Boldy from throwing a little bit of his classic bittersweetness into it: on the chorus of “Francois,” he dedicates the song to “my blue collar criminals in for robbery / Arsonists, kidnap, extortion, bribery.” Even when he’s on the down-low, Boldy can’t help but drop in some emotional heft. Generally, Super Tecmo Bo passed by without much critical impact – there were no Pitchfork reviews or glowing Stereogum profiles – but it’s managed to hold up fairly well in spite of that. It’s not a groundbreaking masterpiece, but it’s very strong nevertheless.
7. Fair Exchange No Robbery (2022)
Boldy goes old-school. Okay, he’s always been fairly old-school (the dude’s 40) but this is the first album he’s done that actually sounds old—and that’s a good thing. Over Nicholas Craven’s sweeping-yet-minimalistic jazz and soul production, Boldy indulges himself in simply dropping bars. When he drops a line like “Big city, small China, started as smalltimers / scared to dwell on my past, I got Alzheimer’s / totin’ my ‘30, me and girlie pullin’ all-nighters” on “Designer Drugs,” you can practically hear him grinning at his own craft. It’s definitely his most analog album. Craven avoids the electronic flourishes of Alchemist’s signature production, instead recalling the Motown-inspired warmth of the ‘90s.
The album’s best moments come when Craven is able to tap into the inherent beauty of the genres he samples from. The triumphant saxophone (Faith Hope and Charity’s “Keep Me Baby”) of “Designer Drugs” transforms Boldy’s flexes into a superhero origin story, while the mournful horns of “Straight and Tall” emphasize the inherent tragedy of street life, even as Boldy boasts about how tough he is. On “0 Trey Nine,” Gue Wop locks himself effortlessly into the song’s bouncy piano rhythm, showing up Boldy on his own track. Even if you’re not a fan of the album, you won’t forget his brief moment of glory: “Flight risk, ain’t wanna let me out I feel like Akon / Black hoodie on, .40 tucked, don’t mistake me for Trayvon.” Fair Exchange No Robbery might not always be perfect, but at its best it doesn’t just remind you of the classics—it competes with them.
6. Bo Jackson (2021)
The hardest part of getting on top is, as everyone knows, staying on top. It’s one thing to get yourself to superstar status. It’s another thing entirely to channel that momentum into something lasting, rather than just burning out. After his absolutely massive 4-album run in 2020, Boldy had established himself as a master of Detroit rap, if not rap in general. And so, in 2021, he made the bold (haha) move of taking a break. Over half a year passed without any new releases from him. And then, suddenly, at the tail end of July, Boldy and Alchemist dropped a few singles before bursting out of the gate with Bo Jackson, the whacked-out, star-studded psych-rap opus that proved Boldy was here to stay. From the moment “Double Hockey Sticks” changed from a straightforward piano-driven flex track into avant-garde crime fiction over what I can only imagine is a xylophone—and then burst into the buoyant vocal funk of “Turpentine”—it was clear that Boldy and Alchemist were about to deliver an album you wouldn’t forget.
Two years later, I can say that they succeeded. Alchemist is at his best here, making sure that each song balances deftly on the tightrope between the darkly weird and the inexplicably catchy. Boldy’s at his most quotable, serving up his greatest collection of one liners: “These n*ggas ain’t cut from my cloth, ‘cause I’m steel wool,” “Press and tear on my Skeletor, hustler forevermore,” “She said she was gonna leave me and I can’t blame her / ‘Cause I was cuttin’ on my side bitch raw with the same razor,” “Got a fetish for those butter babies who love the ladies”— it goes on endlessly. The entire album is just a freaked-out document of a bunch of pros giving their A-game. Even the guest features turn it up to eleven. Benny the Butcher and Freddie Gibbs bring mile-a-minute flows to “Brickmile and Montana” and “Fake Flowers,” respectively, playing off Boldy’s lower-tempo verses magnificently. At the end of “Diamond Dallas,” Stove God Cooks wields his singular strained rasp like a flamethrower, twisting his voice over a tortured, swirling guitar solo. It’s a perfect storm of chaos, a bunch of smashed-together elements that shouldn’t work but do. Quite a few people would say that this is Boldy’s best album, and, honestly, they might be right. From here on out, all the albums are going to be pretty much equal in quality, and the rankings are going to be determined purely by my personal preference more than anything else (as if they weren’t already). In any other rapper’s catalog, an album like Bo Jackson would be the absolute apex, and it’s only because of the sheer awesomeness of Boldy’s catalog that I can put it in sixth. We’re officially entering instant-classic territory now.
5. My 1st Chemistry Set (2013)
Here’s where it all began (well, not really, but let’s say that it is). Back before he was known for the dark-as-hell street stories, and the psychedelia-influenced Alchemist collabs, and the weird jazz-rap auteurism, he was an enthusiastic up-and-comer spitting tales of his badassery over aggressively cinematic keyboard lines. I mean, some of the man’s first lines on the album are “straight shell cases, ARs, Remingtons / spray fields and tear apart ligaments / separating gang starrs from gentlemen / redecorating paint jobs and interior.” Plenty of rappers have come from criminal backgrounds, but Boldy lets you know right off the bat that he’s not a musician with hard luck. He’s a criminal—and a pretty fucking dangerous one, at that—who also happens to write great songs. He has better raps than you, he’s sold more crack than you, he’s slept with your girlfriend, and if you piss him off he’ll shoot you in the head.
The entire album is a breakneck account of his criminal career. He describes himself in “Give Me A Reason” by saying “Satan’s greatest trick was convincing the world he doesn’t exist / so meet the man out the myth, the devil in the flesh,” and talks about “tryna cram twenty two grand in [his] True Religion brand pants” on “Consideration.” Alchemist matches him at every turn, placing over-the-top keyboard and orchestral samples under his vocals to the point where almost every song feels like it should be soundtracking a B-movie car chase. The guests all make sure to turn it up to eleven as well, never failing to match the album’s manic energy. And while many of them are well-established names, the highlights somehow manage to come from the nobodies. To this day, I have no idea who Mafia Double Dee and Peechie Green are, but somehow they manage to drop what might be the two strongest verses on the album back-to-back on “Rappies” (actually, Double Dee’s D-E-T-R-O-I-T acrostic might be one of the strongest verses ever, period). There are a few notable lows on the album—the uncomfortable homophobia that’s present on the otherwise-strong “Moochie,” and the chorus of “Surprise Party,” which is corny to the point of being cringey, but it’s generally an excellent effort. Boldy would grow to surpass it, but as far as debuts go, you could do far worse than this.
4. Killing Nothing (2022)
I might catch flack for saying this, but I think that Real Bad Man is Boldy’s best producer. I know that, objectively, Boldy and Alchemist are iconic—and I’m not about to dispute Alc’s god-tier status behind the boards—but when it comes to Boldy’s particular style, Real Bad Man gets the job done better than anyone else. Exhibit A: Killing Nothing. After 5 acclaimed albums in two years, you’d think that Boldy would have begun to show signs of slowing as 2022 kicked off, but somehow he managed to begin the summer with another classic. And honestly, a lot of credit for that goes to Real Bad Man. I mean, listen to the pure-noir piano of “Water Under the Bridge,” which could go toe-to-toe with anything off The Price of Tea in China. Or the chorus of “Game Time,” whose revved-up goth-rock throb makes Boldy seem like the protagonist of the sickest sci-fi film never made. Generally, the beats are minimalistic, mostly consisting of quietly melodic guitar loops, giving Boldy plenty of space to put his rhymes in center stage.
Boldy’s lyrics on Killing Nothing may be some of the strongest he’s ever dropped, and each song is packed with standouts. Take this gem from “Water Under The Bridge:” “back in grade school / you was running for student council / now you’re a killer and a shooter but we doubt you’ll / take it all the way without having to say a mouthful. An honorable mention goes to “ate your bitch for dessert / that’s water under the bridge” from the same song, which might be one of the most casually badass kiss-offs of all time. On “Sig Sauer,” he indulges himself in wordplay (“demon child, lots of bad habits and some evil traits / mini-drac, fully automatic, let it eat his face”), while “I cook the work until it lock up like some gelatin / ain’t got nothing to hide with a closet full of skeletons” might hit as one of his most weirdly evocative verses yet. Of all Boldy’s albums, Killing Nothing might be the most rap-heavy one, in the sense that he truly allows himself to take center stage, settling comfortably into Real Bad Man’s grooves. It’s arguably his most workmanlike album—though each track is excellent, there aren’t any real standouts—but it might be his most consistently strong release, and that’s an achievement in and of itself. More rappers could use a Killing Nothing in their catalog.
3. The Price of Tea in China (2020)
For most of the listening public (myself included), their introduction to Boldy James was the heart-wrenching word vomit that was “Carruth,” where, over a plaintive blues sample and a wistful piano line, the soon-to-be-legend mourned the death of his friends and the human toll of gang violence. Within less than a minute, we hear him say that “[his] friends came and went, but most of them was murder victims / dead before 20” and that he “grew up in a hellhole, that’s why [he] think[s] so twisted.” Which is maybe why it’s surprising to hear him rap immediately afterwards, on the next track, about killing a guy who tries to take his chain, and then deciding to slaughter the dude’s entire gang just to tie up loose ends. Thus exists the duality of Boldy James. He’s been in the game for way too long, and he’s seen things that no man should half to see, but he can’t quite get out, so he does things that no man should have to do. And he kills people. A lot of people.
There’s surprisingly not that much to say about The Price of Tea in China, despite its now-legend status. It maintains a singularly noirish bent for its entire runtime, never once breaking from its greyscale atmosphere. The Alchemist’s beats consist almost entirely of haunting piano and vocal samples, though he occasionally mixes it up at the end (check that sax on “Speed Demon Freestyle”). Similarly, Boldy never breaks from his character of a steely-eyed killer. He’s just there to move drugs and kill his enemies, preferably both simultaneously. Much of the richness of the album comes from its occasional guests, all of whom match Boldy’s Rorschach-like bleakness with bursts of energy, the standout being Vince Staples’ motormouth enthusiasm on the gritty “Surf and Turf” (an example: “burst from the whip, drive-by shooter / autopilot when I bye-bye losers”). And somehow, it only gets grittier from there).
The Price of Tea in China’s secret weapon ends up being its moments of emotion, which, while far and few between, hit like trucks. When Boldy raps “my son think I don’t love him / he don’t know his daddy thugging” on the chorus of “Surf and Turf,” it’s a genuine punch to the gut, made only more tragic by its followup lines, which are dedicated to flexing Boldy’s street status. Similarly, when he talks about trying to get money for his cancer-ridden aunt in “Phone Bill,” it’s the matter-of-factness that hits you the most. He’s not trying to gain your sympathy—shit like this is just part of his life. Given how quickly Boldy’s risen, it’s hard to remember that back when The Price of Tea in China dropped, he was essentially a nobody to the larger rap world, but the album still remains a singular document in his catalog. It’s a pitch-black document of a man with nothing to lose. We may never get anything like it again, either from him or anyone else.
2. Real Bad Boldy (2020)
A well-deserved victory lap after his massive 2020 run, Real Bad Boldy somehow manages to stand as an instant classic on its own. Clocking in at just under half an hour, it never wastes a second, with each of its ten songs packing a tight little burst of energy. A major part of that is Real Bad Man, who manage to turn a handful of low-key elements—eerie vocal samples, chilly keyboard lines, and low-slung basslines—into an ominous, richly textured soundscape that manages to make Boldy sound like a true crime flick kingpin. Be it through the twisted soul vocals of “Real Bad Boldy” and “Hold Me Down,” the dirty funk of “Light Bill,” On Ten,” and “Champion,” or the heist-thriller electronica of “Failed Attempt,” the beats coalesce together in a way that makes Boldy sound more badass than he ever has before.
Boldy backs it up with his evocative lyricism, painting some of his darkest verbal pictures yet. He’s “cold as an ice grill, slicker than greased lightning.” Shooting up his rivals: “we made his home whistle / caught five, ironic, that was a chrome nickel.” Even the guests make themselves stand out—check Stove God Cooks’ rasped-out flex on “Thousand Pills:” “I had the feds tap dancing in my ear before Rick Rubin had a beard.” Everyone brings their A-game. The standout is “Street Shit,” where Boldy narrates a risky transfer over a dark-edged synthwave melody that could have come straight from a Nicholas Winding Refn movie. It’s part origin story, part flex, and 100% craft—“no remote location and your homie gon’ be waiting / we gon’ snatch his little brother up and throw him in the basement” is one of the best couplets he’s dropped in his career.
More so than anything else, however, what makes Real Bad Boldy stand out is how genuinely threatening Boldy seems. He’s always been dangerous—hell, the man’s whole career is basically just “I am the one who knocks”—but, more than on any other album, he sounds like he’s relishing being dangerous—not because of the money, or the fame, or the girls—but because it’s fun. When he raps about “duct tape[ing] the kids and the missus” on “Little Vicious,” he sounds just as nonchalant as he does during his moments of braggadocio. It’s a bit like hearing Anton Chigurh in the studio. Of course, Boldy would kick off 2021 with another “serious” album, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d rap about being tortured by his crimes just as much as he’d rap about the crimes themselves, but for a brief moment he took a bit of pure, sociopathic joy in his craft, and the results were glorious.
1. Manger on McNichols (2020)
Recorded between 2007 and 2010 by Boldy and Midnight Funk Association member Sterling Toles, Manger on McNichols might technically serve as the rapper’s lyrical debut (he’d make his official debut in 2009, dropping a pair of standout verses on The Cool Kids’ mixtape Merry Christmas). Given that, it’s remarkable how mature Boldy’s lyricism is. Over the album’s 42-minute runtime, he grapples with new fatherhood, the prison-to-prison pipeline (“Now my lady on my case, so I’m filling out an app / All I know is how to whip dust in a Pyrex”—and that’s the opening to the first verse on the album), family trauma, the death of his friends, and his own steadily fraying mental health. It’s an uncomfortably unflinching look at post-industrial Detroit, in all its bleakness.
Of course, Boldy’s been rapping about Detroit poverty for his whole career now—that alone wouldn’t be enough to make Manger a cut above the rest. But thanks to a decade of sonic tweaking from Toles, it’s the most musically diverse album in Boldy’s catalog by a mile. Do you prefer the jazzed-out Spanish guitar (“Detroit River Rock”), DnB (“B.B. Butcher”), or neo-electro-soul (“Birth of Bold (the christening)”)? Take your pick—no matter what, the production is gorgeous. Entire jazz sessions erupt under Boldy’s verses, while ambient electronic flourishes make the album sound like a sci-fi score (check those space-age synths on the hauntingly beautiful “Requiem”).
Capping it all off are some of Boldy’s most economically devastating lines. He’s always been a master of blending staring-into-the-void darkness with unexpected emotional heft, but he brings a new level of quietly brokenness to Manger. “Medusa” illustrates the difficulty of getting hired as an ex-con—“Have you ever been convicted of a felony? / Yes”—while in “Detroit River Rock” he describes a vicious associate by saying “besides his tattoos, he never shed a tear”. The chorus of “Middle of Next Month” sports what might be the single most bloodthirsty set of bars put to tape, and “Mommy Dearest (a eulogy)” spins Biggie’s “I know my mother wish she got a fucking abortion” into a devastating pit of self-loathing that makes “Suicidal Thoughts” sound like a hype track. Ultimately, “Requiem” sums up the theme of the album in one succinct line: “it hurt to kill a n*gga you love when it hit close to home.” It’s a brutal, beautiful, often-fucked-up album for a brutal, beautiful, often-fucked-up city and its tortured inhabitants.
edited by Eric Harwood.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.
