Jaden Smith's debut album, SYRE, will be a surprise to anyone who's bumped into articles about him over the past couple of years. Perhaps it was the gender-fluid campaign he did for Louis Vuitton or esoteric interviews with publications like Time magazine cryptically mentioning how he'll be "gone" in 10 years that have built the perception that he's something of an alien.
You might have expected that this album would be a collection of ambient marimba drum solos recorded in a zero gravity room.
The actual project is not nearly so bizarre and more importantly it is pretty damn good.
The album opens with a cinematic four-track bass-heavy salad of angsty hip-hop that's as beautiful as it is cool. In it he ties raps about Martin Luther King jnr, Louis Vuitton, love and the state of the youth into a wonderfully relatable bow. You catch whiffs of influence from the likes of Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar but it's still unmistakeably him.
Smith is no Jay-Z but his talent level is definitely above many of his peers and he certainly is not nearly as shallow.
At times he is raw, passionate and vulnerable, while at others he exudes the air of a kid who knows something the rest of us don't. Consequently it's not digestible in a single sitting. Songs like Hope, Lost Boy and Batman need time to swirl around your brain, and then breathe like a good wine.
SYRE is not necessarily an album that will tickle everyone's fancy. It may be a smidge overindulgent and unrelatable for some folks but as an art work, especially a debut, it bodes well for one half of those two weird kids Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith are raising.
• 'SYRE' is available on Apple Music
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