The art of pure anticipation plays such an integral role in designing any album rollout from a significant act, regardless of their level of fame and/or prominence. This fact becomes especially true when that coming release is meant to follow up such an acclaimed and widely-known project that had preceded it, leaving such a daunting shadow to either fill or completely take over.
To say that anticipation plays into the current status of Vision4k’s already immaculate career would be selling even such an incredible figure like this short. Since making his name in the late-2010s with a number of era-defining singles leading up to his alt-rap masterwork Recluse in 2019, the influential figure has spent the majority of 2020 knowing that a follow-up to that aforementioned album needed to come to light — thus creating that sense of wonder if it really would during the entirety of this year.
It was a sense of wonder that finally manifested into the resounding announcement of R — the album that will come to serve as that very follow-up come its release in December of this year. That alone sealed the anticipation as to what would be the follow-up to his 2019 classic, but for an answer as to how, look no further than the first single off of the forthcoming project “Honey Pills.”
This track teases towards something of a musical odyssey at the hands of this all-encompassing talent. Taking a dark and brooding tone via its slow-paced and tellingly dragging instrumental, the track saturates itself in such a mysterious and atmospheric aura from a sonic standpoint; it is almost as though the song is a warning sign for the explosion of its accompanying tracks once the album does arrive in full.
The foreboding nature is matched in perfect correspondence by Vision’s performance on the mic, as his defining vocal tones work ever-so-ideally with the given instrumental and its own ominous nature in itself. These passages are backed up by his lyrical themes extending into perhaps the song’s darkest territories from a baseline perspective; it paints a narrative of stepping into an unknown and “make-believe” world that only Vision himself is able to comprehend, which certainly speaks to the drugged-out allusions upfront, but they also serve as a spiritual warning for the musical world that he is planning on taking us through come December.
No track could have served as such a pitch-perfect re-entrance into this, again, completely unfounded world that only such a creative mastermind like Vision4k could ever imagine as this single by itself. What will make up this coming experience is now the most concerning mystery at hand, but that is exactly what is going to make the inevitable release of R that much more impactful.