Big Flowers x shemar's 'i love nature!' Is a Bracing, Bitcrushed Masterpiece of Modern Dread
You cannot stream i love nature! on the usual services. It went up on Bandcamp on September 25 and that is where it has stayed, which for a record this pointedly concerned with Big Tech’s enclosure of everyday life reads less like an oversight than a position. Fourteen tracks, from NYC-based Kurdish-American multi-hyphenate Big Flowers and East New York beatmaker shemar.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Bandcamp Daily’s write-up caught the governing trick: “the saturated, bitcrushed drums on the title track create a wind-in-the-leaves woosh.” The percussion is deliberately degraded until it stops reading as percussion and starts reading as weather. It’s a hip-hop record whose bottom end is doing landscape painting.
The Spatial Dynamics: “Each track has a noise floor reminiscent of a forest or prairie,” the same review noted — “the wispy hi-hats on ‘resist as macrophage’ resemble chirping of cicadas on a summer evening.” That noise floor is the album’s whole architecture. Bandcamp Daily described the result as “a loud, disorienting, chaotic record that constantly feels like it’s teetering on a knife’s edge,” and the sequencing keeps it there, from “the forest dies with its metronome” through “guillotine osmosis” to “extinction pose.”
Standout Performance
shemar, whose beats carry the argument. The guest list — Jvly38! takes “(nature!)” outright, suchi appears on “reprise,” KO6i on “my people megazord,” DENAMIS closes the record with “outside” — works because the production gives each voice a different corner of the same overgrown field to stand in.
Why It’s Certified
Bandcamp Daily called it “a blistering analysis of our brutal, confusing modern era,” and in naming it among September’s best hip-hop described “a piercing commentary on modern themes, including political greenwashing, destructive AI practices, and our collective withdrawal from the outside world as cultivated by Big Tech.” It’s a heavy brief. The record carries it without once sounding like a lecture, which is the hardest thing on this list to pull off.