Roc Marciano : 656
Listen to Roc Marciano and immerse yourself in a veteran’s self-assured work. He doesn’t have anything to prove, he just delights in proving it again and again. And the results, in the form of consistently high-quality music, never fail to satisfy on multiple levels. 656, his latest album and fourth in three years, exemplifies this perfectly.
It’s true you somewhat know what you’re getting into with a Roc Marci album: Production, often his own (as with all of 656) that’s bedrocked by samples from the most obscure jazz and soul crates. Thickets of verse that will just as often relate a blowjob joke as tell a sobering street fable. Marci’s signature laconic delivery—effortless cool buoyed by undercurrents of menace. (He won’t necessarily rejoice in fucking you up, but he will if he thinks he must.) Catalogs of luxury references that never feel eye-rolling the way they do with certain rappers. 656 has all that, but it never feels repetitive because of the expertise involved in the execution.
Marciano stands among modern hip-hop’s indisputable technique experts, yet doesn’t sound like he’s imitating any of them, not even those who may have directly influenced him (Nas, Guru of Gang Starr, Cam’Ron at his Come Home with Me/Purple Haze peak). While technically intricate rap can become a labyrinth of gobbledygook bullshit, Marci never falls into such traps. Lyrics of dizzying complexity and excellence abound throughout 656—layers of internal rhyme that must be reread to grasp the language fully—but you never feel like you’re hearing the empty virtuosity of elder Eminem (or worse, Papoose).
In part, it’s because Roc Marciano is an effortless entertainer and a world-class shit-talker. “You’re not shinin, your dime is quiet like a wire/Shit on my eye, you ain’t gotta fly to Dubai to be dehumanized/I promise you I could do the job,” he raps on “Hate is Love.” “Vanity” features the same kind of staggering wordplay in service of knocking a buster down a peg: “What’s that scent you’re wearing, is that Sua?/Is that Porsche you call your car or the arm farce you got on?/You tryna trauma-bond cryin’ inside the Prada store?” Marci’s delivery makes this stuff (and the boasts that counterweigh it, like “I shit on the floor in Dejeun and Yves Saint Laurent”) seem like hard-earned triumph.
There is, of course, a spartan minimalism and underlying darkness to all this—again, like all of Roc Marciano’s work since his breakout masterpiece Marcberg. “Easy Bake Oven” tells us chilling slices of past sins that got him to present-day comfort: “I was skin and bones when I made my bones.” Arguably, the production reflects as much as the lyrics. Marci is more comfortable than ever minimizing or eliminating drums from his production (not unlike the late, great Ka, his friend and collaborator), because the whip-crack of his sentences can hit harder than most programmed or sampled snares. He also adds analog synths to his sonic palette, as on “Tracy Morgan Vomit” and the spare brutality of “Childish Things.” (At one point in the latter, the music reduces to a five-note synth riff, and there’s as much hostility in that quiet motif and Marci’s lyrics as in anything by M.O.P., which is saying something.)
Unlike some previous albums of his, Roc Marciano includes almost no features on 656, leaving only two for relative newcomer Errol Holden. (“Trapeze” is the best one, though they’re both great.) It’s good to see Marciano has kindred spirits in his corner of the hip-hop universe—which sometimes feels awfully small—but he needs virtually no help to reach the heights of excellence.
Label: Marci/Pimpire
Year: 2026
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