The bulk of Slimedude2003 comprises a bundle of fan-favorite snippets and leaks from the past six months, but wasn’t the project Protect initially had in mind for the summer. The rapper’s hand was forced when fans found his unreleased album on [untitled] after close associate and streamer Bruce Dropemoff inadvertently leaked the project’s URL onstream in late April. The files quickly hit the internet, and so from a distance, Slimedude2003 is less of a gift to the fans than an understandable attempt to reclaim ownership (and streaming income) for these songs.
But that eclectic, unsequenced approach might actually be in Protect’s favor, giving listeners a broader view of his uncanny taste in music production. And these are truly some of the most beautiful and intricate beats Protect has ever gotten, which is saying a lot when you consider past heaters like “Ion Wanna Talk” and “IfUGotMe.” The echoey “Firearm” twinkles with starry beeps and boops by ovanni; makkgin threads a woozy, ascending synthline through the fog of “Re4,” where Protect compares himself to the horror games’ protagonist Leon S. Kennedy.
But it’s the album’s backstretch where things truly come together. chinapoet and heroine construct a stuttering, juddering amalgam of a sstepteam-type beat for “Ac130;” sentry and 23.558×23.558 (yes, that’s really his name) operate in a similar vein on “Reset.” The negative space on “Reset” in particular inspires Protect to dig a tiny bit deeper to fill out these songs, admitting that online comments about his looks, “turnt me to a hider / but I can’t be no hider.” That simple repetition might sound silly on paper, but it’s infused with enough emotion on wax to go down easy. Later on that same song, Protect raps, “Dive with no thought, like dolphin / Can we stay together like dolphins?” The line lands genuinely thanks to his oddly tender affect.