ZelooperZ had never been afraid of being too odd. It takes a special distinctiveness to outweird RXKNephew and Danny Brown on the same album, and Z’s trophy of weirdest rapper alive from Van Goghs Left Ear started to gather dust by August 2025. Over his more than 15 year career, the rapper has carved out his own pocket in Detroit beside mentor Danny Brown, both harbering the same loose-cannon eccentricity that made the wackiest of verses just too interesting to look away from. In his 2025 project Dali Ain’t Dead, ZelooperZ swaps out a small portion of his whimisical lyrics for sincere ones while still showing off the same amusing personality. What’s left is half an hour of ZelooperZ falling in love, rapping about everything under the sun, and earning his claim as a successor of Salvador Dali, all over some of the most consistently engaging production we’ve heard all decade.
The project opens with “Babe, you ready” from a female voice, an addition that would be complementary to any other project but acts more like the caution for whiplash before an amusement park rollercoaster ride in this one. What follows is a 90-second looped soul sample in which ZeeloperZ raps in an almost gestural way, effortlessly flowing from 8 Mile references to floral imagery. After the chorus fades out, a more traditional trap beat in “Mona Lisa Left Eye” follows, a song very loosely themed around TLC’s Lisa Left Eye and Falcons WR Andre Rison’s argument which ended in Rison’s house being burned down. In the next song, over a luscious sample of the All My Love from the 1992 comedy musical Bebe’s Kids, Z finds himself at his most genuine, asking you to “Take a walk in [his] shoes as a Bebe kid” as he describes the pains of growing up. No more than 30 seconds later, he’s screaming bar for bar with Zach Fox over an aggressive, blown out beat. Whether Z’s creative choices are symptomatic of versatility or insanity is inconclusive, but ZelooperZ can rap about just about anything, on just about any beat.
While it not a stretch to imagine ZeeloperZ finding a pocket to rap in over a Geiger counter beat, the album sees some of its best moments in its production. Dilip, who has earned production and executive production credits on Travis Scott’s Jackboys 2, Sahbabii’s Saheem, and much of Paris Texas’ discography, builds a lush palette for the album’s sound. The production distinctly positions itself as a (perhaps refreshing) departure from mainstream trap, while still holding enough confidence to throw punchy drums on a beautiful soul sample and leave the rest to ZeeloperZ when needed. The rapper-producer pair shows this off best in Describe, where Z introduces a love he’s unable to describe, resorting to loosely bundled kindling in analogies and one-liners that light the same bonfire he sees in his love. As he sings through the song whose production is just as much R&B as it is trap, the same voice that was rapping about rhinoceros and sex over the Crash Bandicoot theme a couple years earlier sounds exactly the same and feels almost unrecognizable at the same time.
For how much ZelooperZ’s voice makes up his artistic personality, it feels perplexingly disconnected from his lyrics, as if Danny Brown was performing the lyrics of Some Rap Songs for the first time at a table read. A listen through could imagine Z recording each song one after another with the same grin on his face whether rapping about cigarettes, 50s sitcoms, or people in his life he’s loved. From a certain angle, it could be mistaken as a flaw in his methodology, but the energy he inevitably carries into every line makes it hard to believe he’s unenthusiascially punching in lyrics at the studio.
The perplexity is perhaps resolved through the theme of Dali Aint Dead (if one could even exist in this tangled web of verses) where he likens himself to it’s eponymous Spanish surrealist. Past surface level name drops and samples of Salvador Dali’s vocals, as well as the album title/cover directly referencing the artist, ZelooperZ’s project shows an almost uncanny resemblance to the themes of Dali’s work. If Dali’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening” was taken through a time machine to the contemporary trap world, the tiny bee that inspired the chaotic painting might as well be the two-second sample ZelooperZ builds the rapidly metamorphosing “Hypnogogia” around.
For a return to convention in Dali Ain’t Dead, ZelooperZ surprisingly finds a way to keep listeners engaged. Precisely curated beats and handpicked features keep the project focused, rarely distracting from the goal of showing off ZelooperZ’s absurd personality. By the end, very little can be taken away––other than the confirmation that we want to hear whatever ZelooperZ has to say next.
Rating: one million / ten
Related Works: Works of Salvador Dali, 2023 Tua Tagovailoa, Monty Python's Flying Circus