Album Review: Little Pain- L.I.T.T.L.E.

Last year, roughly around the same time of year, I said that the “sad rap movement was very real.”

And I wasn’t kidding.

Arriving a year after his impressive debut, “sad rapper” Little Pain has returned with his sophomore effort, L.I.T.T.L.E—an album that finds Pain exponentially more focused, giving him the opportunity to expand both as a lyricist, as well as musically.

For an album that is technically classified as a “mixtape,” and given away for free via a Mediafire link in a Fader interview about him, L.I.T.T.L.E sounds gigantic. It doesn’t sound expensive, or slick, but it sounds like Pain spent more time working with producers on this set of beats—with the result showcasing the growth Pain has experienced over the last year.

One of the things that was so attention grabbing about When Thugz Cry was the dark and spooky production by Suicideyear on a number of that album’s tracks. Noticeably missing from L.I.T.T.L.E are beats credited to Suicideyear, but his atmospheric take on hip-hop can still be heard on a track like the remix to “Tommy Strawn,” as well as in some of the other instrumentation on songs like “Still Simpin’” and “Pain Killers.”

As a rapper, Little Pain has become more confident since When Thugz Cry. It shows from the opening track, “L.I.T.T.L.E,” with Pain’s delivery demanding attention when he gets on the mic. Part of what makes this album so successful, and not a continuation of some kind of gimmick, is Pain’s self-awareness—he’s sad, he raps about being sad, but he does so by maintain a sense of humor to make the material listenable, and even enjoyable.

“Sad rap,” as a theoretical genre, doesn’t seem like it would be “enjoyable,” per se, but Little Pain dresses up his lyrical content in such a clever way that the self deprecation comes off as a punch line that hits hard—“I’m a shitty-ass person, I’ve been shitty since a child. I should be a fucking toilet, being shitty is my style,” he says with a straight face on the album’s title track. Then later, “Too busy being shitty, I don’t got the time to smile.”

It isn’t all jokes on L.I.T.T.L.E, however—on the incredibly dark “Pain Killers,” Pain breathlessly raps “I’ll crack a smile when I go to hell,” prior to reaching the refrain—“I tried suicide once and I’ll try it again. That’s why I write songs where I die at the end.”

But it isn’t all darkness either. In a surprising turn, towards the end of the record, Pain writes a love song dedicated to the character of “Marceline” from the television program “Adventure Time.” Over a sunny, poppy hip-hop beat anchored by acoustic guitar plucking, Pain professes, “I love it when you come around. We pout and mope around the town—that’s because you’re my gothic bae.”

For an album that contains a line like, “Bitch, I already know I’m sadder than a bitch. The only thing sadder is my bitch and she’s sadder than a bitch,”—and for an album that contains a bonus track about Pain’s love of doo-rags, there’s actually a rather surprising amount of thought put into L.I.T.T.L.E. In the interview with The Fader that accompanies the release of the album, he says that this project is different when compared to his previous effort because, “ I realized I'm basically talking to myself in my music. I'm alive, I'm making music, I'm healthy, I have a family who cares about me. Those are things I should be happy about, but society is telling me that's not enough…L.I.T.T.L.E. is about trying to find balance between wanting more and still having a sense of who you are as a person and what really matters. There's room for everything. I shouldn't be judged for how I feel, and I'm not going to judge you.”

In a year when rap music—mainstream or mixtape circuit or otherwise—has been anything but interesting, Little Pain continues to be a true original voice for the genre as a whole, pushing the boundaries of the dreaded “sad rap” theoretical sub-genre. And what could have been written off as a novelty has become a fully developed and realized idea that is continuing to mature. L.I.T.T.L.E. is not a “definitive” statement, but on it, Pain makes a statement never the less—and whether he knows it or not, has made a hip-hop album about the human condition.

L.I.T.T.L.E. is available, for FREE, right now.