Like a pop-up book, emo rap is populated by surprises. And there is a class of artists who, on first glance, make little sense. Their music has no business being so sticky and inventive, teetering on timeless. Paging through the canon, more often than not, you will discover a silly and curiously dressed white kid becoming a beacon of innovation. So goes the story of Minnesota artist Corbin Smidzik (known as Spooky Black during his seemingly sudden arrival in 2014), who answered the early 2010s boom of TeamSESH and BONES with a chilly, tender, and R&B-inflected single, “WITHOUT YOU.”
Produced by SESH’s GREAF, “WITHOUT YOU” is a melodic departure from Corbin’s 2013 mixtape Forest, which had the then-fifteen-year-old artist emphasize his clumsier horrorcore “devil rap” chops as inspired by Lil Ugly Mane.1 Here, Corbin brings together his base music influences—he began a musical journey on a diet of rock while learning to play guitar, and by high school he was into dubstep, emo, and singing—to produce a fully realized breakout moment.
“WITHOUT YOU” has all the hallmarks of a canonized emo rap song: pained brags, broken hearts, and looming death. But while his peers had more rough-hewn deliveries, Corbin is disarmingly adept at singing and expressing narrative tension. The song hinges on a pervasive fragility—one wrong move and it might all crumble. “WITHOUT YOU” is soft and sheer, essentially barren, like staring into an endless, snow-dusted forest. It is exceptionally lonely. The atmosphere largely distracts from Corbin’s appearance in the music video as questionable, bordering on cultural appropriation with his chain and durag. Despite his dress being little more than minstrel, “WITHOUT YOU” plays out as a deceptive earworm. It snakes and coils in all the right ways until there’s a vise grip on the listener’s attention. Corbin pulls off the rare trick of crafting a song that unlocks a realm of suppressed memories to stumble through.
Corbin sounds frail. His brittle but enchanting voice has nothing to do with the high-minded braggadocio of the Twin Cities hip-hop lineage cultivated by Rhymesayers. Where Atmosphere was a grimy, crunchy, and in-your-face emo display, Corbin shrinks behind his vocals. He does not adopt the density of early 2000s Midwestern rap tropes. He doesn’t follow BONES and Xavier Wulf into the bloody gallows, either. Instead, he is a byproduct of the internet’s flattening, reshaping, and rolling out of music culture. Ready to be picked apart by the consumer, this pastry-thin amalgam of rap and music histories is the backbone of Corbin’s sound, but it also helps him unveil something new within the scope of emo rap. For as chilly as “WITHOUT YOU” sounds, it is also largely affable, thanks to Corbin’s singing. In 2014, Corbin was able to unlock a strain of emo rap that draws you in, a la Kid Cudi, but shocks your system without warning.
When music critic Emma Garland remarks to me about Lil Peep’s bucking traditional masculinity, and emo overall being a feminization of hardcore, I hear that in the upper register of Corbin on “WITHOUT YOU.” At the time of this song’s release, Corbin’s doomsday vibe had yet to set in. There is merely a forlorn young man wrestling with isolation and heartache. It’s not exactly the hysterical shrieking you’d expect when bringing gendered politics into play—that is, what makes something “feminine” in our national consciousness?—but you do get the impression Corbin is all but crying on the mic. Shouts are replaced with meekness.
The drawl of Corbin’s voice mirrors a depressed immobilization. Listening to “WITHOUT YOU” feels like being frozen from the inside out. And yet, when the single was released, Kylie Jenner filmed herself dancing to it on Instagram. This odd endorsement sparked the song’s viral ascendance—and complicated its tone. It was woeful, but it was also fit for an influencer’s social media feed. It would be one of the key times in the 2010s that emo rap transitioned from digital underground spaces to the masses.
Still, press around Corbin is scarce. The artist was, and remains, reclusive. Complex named the song one of the best of 2014, calling Corbin an “out-of-nowhere Internet sensation” who replied to the magazine’s request for an interview with a curt, “No.”2 To close 2014, Minnesota’s Star Tribune published, “Trying to decode MN’s viral sensation Spooky Black,” writing, “one of the reasons it’s so funny is because it wasn’t intended to be funny.”3
The article hits on the confounding nature of 2010s emo rap. Much like Yung Lean before him, Corbin drew a confused audience in with his charisma on “WITHOUT YOU.” The article goes on to lightly mock Corbin’s dress and his “gimmicky and dumb approach” to anonymity, between decent critiques of Spooky Black as an artist name. “I guess the joke was on me, though,” veteran journalist Chris Riemenschneider writes, not finding Corbin’s early offerings all that compelling or funny, “Spooky Black is proving to be more than a novelty act.”
The sense of, “What do we make of this?” permeates a majority of early commentary on emo rappers’ careers. Though Corbin drew less ire than Yung Lean, who drew as much hatred as Rebirth-era Lil Wayne, but for different reasons, Corbin’s being shot down in the local paper feels like a rite of passage. Emo rap is supposed to be unnerving. If the music itself doesn’t follow Atmosphere’s skin-crawling presentation, then the ecosystem around the music surely will. Eventually, Corbin would grow into both his frame and his voice. He would shed the Spooky Black moniker, which was itself predated by a “Lil’ Spook” alias Corbin would like to forget, and after a series of EPs, throw himself into Mourn, his formidable 2017 debut album.
“WITHOUT YOU” slightly revealed the paranoid depths into which Corbin was descending. “I guess it’s the only kind of music I feel like I can make, there has to be some sort of dark undertone or else it seems corny to me,” Corbin told Dazed just a few days after Mourn was released.4 “I’m just, like, angry all the time about shit. I’m just not a very positive person—a lot of the time, at least. Most of the songs I wrote pretty fast, we just tried to capture moments of emotional shit.”
Described as a “goth-crooner”5 by FADER, the Corbin who appears on Mourn is positively freaked out. He dips into black metal, amps up the tension of “WITHOUT YOU,” and adds a growl to his delivery that drives the album’s narrative, which centers a male speaker building a bunker for himself and his partner to survive the apocalypse, culminating in two deaths and a profound sense of loneliness. Single “ICE BOY” opens the album with some of Corbin’s most pained vocals. His wounded screams enhance the dreariness, and the apex line, “Don’t expect to convince you to take my hand,” erupts as deeply isolating.
Spanning forty minutes across ten jarring tracks, Mourn is a clawing plea for listeners to feel what Corbin is feeling—the dread, the deep-seated anxiety, as on “Giving Up.” Mourn rejects accessibility in favor of discomfort. It is the underground side of what Lil Uzi Vert popularized with 2017’s “XO Tour Llif3,” where they brought death into the mainstream party scene with a pop filter.
Corbin rejects the tenderness of his breakout moment to make something nettling. A quick scan of the differences between Mourn and “WITHOUT YOU” would suggest Corbin was adopting a more traditionally masculine approach to expressing his pain. The bluntly complex emotions and the howling deliveries are gruff, but beneath lies a hysteria that scans womanly. Those crunchy breaks in his voice and the tumult of the record are not tough-guy posturing. Corbin sounds afraid. His voice has matured, but on Mourn, he sounds even more delicate than on “WITHOUT YOU.”
“If you’re looking for a silver lining in the plot, you won’t find one,” reads Pat Levy’s Pitchfork review of the record.6 “Mourn is a difficult album to pin down, a piece of music that is both stylistically transcendent and lyrically half-baked. Some songs find Corbin pushing his vocal chords [sic] to their limits with guttural screams so packed with emotion you can feel the veins popping out of his neck as he digs through his soul with a rusty pickaxe.”
The Pitchfork appraisal of Corbin’s often-obtuse writing follows the pattern of most reviews of emo rap citing the music as impressive and affecting, but the lyrics as confused and not quite ready for wax. Mourn suffers from lofty and unrealized ambitions baked into a concept album, and as a result, it is stronger as a series of vocal exercises than it is as a complete body of work. Still, the searing emotional potential was there, and by 2021 Corbin would achieve his magnum opus in Ghost With Skin.
Released after the majority of pantheon emo rap artists had passed away, Ghost With Skin is a daring entry in a withering genre. Corbin tightened up his writing, allowing it to carry Skin the way his singing carried Mourn. Now, there is balance. Opener “Tell Me” takes the wizening of a growing artist and plays out as one of the most resonant songs Corbin has ever released as he sings, “Tell me how your heart ripped open like that.”
“In short, [‘Tell Me’ is] an attempt to give respite and consolation to someone you love, that has experienced suffering in the past,” Corbin shared when the album released.7 “An offer to be their escape. A wish to give hope for the future, and stoke their will to go on. Remaining cognizant of the realities of the world we live in, which we were brought into without our consent, but must cope and continue on in for the sake of the ones we love.”
Images of caskets, endless floods of tears, and gruesome body horror sneak in between the folds of tenderness on Ghost With Skin. The album feels far more literary than anything Corbin had dropped prior. On “Rambo,” he seeks shelter in love, but by “ctrl alt del,” he delivers the best line of the record: “I’m not your bitch, I’m a person.” With this open and punchy call for his humanity to be recognized at the same time as wanting to escape himself, Corbin captures the essence of emo rap. He balances the complexity of wanting to disappear but also wanting to be seen.
There is a staggering level of growth between “WITHOUT YOU” and Ghost With Skin, as you could expect from an artist after eight years of craftwork. Yet, it still feels luxurious to watch an emo rapper mature over nearly a decade—considering a majority of the pantheon of emo rap icons were unable to see their creativity flourish beyond a few years. In thinking critically about emo rap, some measure of prospecting is required in light of all the tragedy tainting the genre’s history.
Late Georgia rapper 6 Dogs’s first posthumous album RONALD. is a complete picture of healing and the ways in which emo rap can lead to a more holistic manner of expressing feelings, but there is no other work suggesting emo rap could mature into something healthier. Looking at Corbin, however, we witness critical developments within the scene. Corbin’s transition from vibes to paranoia to some of the most raw and sincere declarations in the genre—ones that feel more complete than most other writers in the space—plays like an all-seeing artifact.
Ghost With Skin helps establish a mission statement for emo rap in a new decade. Much of what the late Lil Peep danced around in his writing was this sense of wanting to be seen without actually calling attention to himself. Wanting love without consequence was more Peep’s mode. Corbin appears to want love as well, but in a more existential way. The music here is a lot less occupied with damning nameless and faceless women, and more concerned with the supposed interior life Corbin is battling to restore. It mirrors many of the themes of digicore, a scene that erupted following COVID lockdowns.
“I love a lot of digicore’s music. Those kids are obviously directly influenced by this era of music, too,” music critic Colin Joyce says. “Those kids are natural torchbearers, if not for the sound, then for the sentiments at the core of it. That’s ultimately what emo rap is about: the subject matter. Kids who are alone in bedrooms and feel bad will always be there.”
Even if Ghost With Skin doesn’t follow the stylistically sawtooth tones of the subsequent digicore scene, perhaps that makes it all the more valuable as a look into what emo rap traditionalism can be in the 2020s. New artists like Dro Kenji and DC The Don adopt more rageful aesthetics, something closer to Rico Nasty than Lil Peep, but they borrow from Corbin’s tortured playbook as well.
Corbin is a good barometer of emo’s continued presence, with his 2020 feature on The Kid LAROI’s “NOT FAIR” acting as the traditional control for a song that was obviously engineered to take over the pop arena. The juxtaposition between Corbin’s vexed vocals and LAROI’s sweeping choruses is a picture of emo rap’s past and present. The trajectory of Corbin’s career shows off the sprawl of the genre, how the fingers of the culture can spread out and clasp most anything in an ever-increasingly genre-agnostic world.