7/10

Across his new studio album 'Ready 4 The World', Chicago artist Freidrich$ folds experimental folk, indie-pop, dub, hip-hop, trap and R&B into a record that feels impressively uninterested with where one genre ends and another begins. Yet the striking thing is not how many styles are present, but how naturally they coexist within one another.

Freidrich$ has always approached his sound from a slightly sideways angle, absorbing the intimacy of indie songwriting and filtering it through rhythms and production ideas more commonly associated with hip-hop and R&B. Here, those instincts finally feel completely integrated. The songs can be catchy and immediately accessible while still taking strange turns, refusing predictable structures or leaving deliberately rough edges exposed.

His voice here is crucial to that shift. Earlier work often buried or reshaped the vocal through distortion and processing, but this collection largely removes that protection. He sounds closer, less disguised and consequently more emotionally exposed.

'Respekt', 'Ashamed', 'Long Distance' and 'City Lights' bring romantic longing and alienation into relatively everyday territory, while tracks such as 'Lucifer, but Ironically', 'After Life, Revisited' and 'Parallax' push towards the metaphysical and absurd. Even 'I Still Wanna Be Adored' and 'Up in Our Lives, Again' turn back towards earlier material, making the record almost feel like a conversation with Freidrich$’s own history.

The result is a strangely expansive experience, as dub textures sit beside trap rhythms, folk songwriting drifts into experimental pop, and R&B melody emerges from arrangements that feel deliberately unstable.

In all, Freidrich$ is no longer sounding like an outsider trying to find the right world; he sounds like an artist confident enough to build one all of his own.