“Blurry” by Chris Waters

A lot of rappers have been putting more focus on speed and a nimble instrumental arrangement than they have the substance of their storytelling, but this isn’t the case with Chris Waters, an Austin-based hip-hop singer/songwriter who has been taking his scene by storm in the last few years. His latest single, “Blurry,” and its companion video take the dark clouds of 2020 and compress them into a pop-friendly rap number that relies more on tonality than it does tempo to send chills across the audience, and to some (including me), it feels like the breakout Waters has been working towards for a while now. 

Right around the two and a half minute mark in “Blurry,” a crushing band of instrumental noise smacks us in the face with as much of a sonic wallop as an artist can muster from within the recording studio, but even as this feels like the fever pitch in the track, it ultimately gives way to the most cathartic set of verses we’ll hear from Waters on the other side of the beat.

We’re on the edge of our seats from beginning to end amidst his performance not through synthetic tricks but via poetic lashings and a musical moxie uncommon on the FM dial, regardless of the genre we’re talking about. 

“Blurry” drifts away into the fog much as most of us wish 2020 would, but when it’s all over, its message isn’t lost on us within minutes of the track coming to a conclusion. This might be the most intimate track we’ve collectively seen and heard from Chris Waters since his arrival on the scene back in the early 2010s, but if there’s anything that it doesn’t indicate about the future of its creator, it’s a sense of the inspiration – and the creativity – hitting its peak anytime soon. 

Mindy McCall