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The road from the projects to private jets is long and treacherous, often marked by sweat and bloodshed. A blacklight might reveal those stains, but it couldn’t tell their story. Stalley illuminates the truth behind every mark on Blacklight, the Ohio legend’s collaborative album with prolific Michigan producer Apollo Brown. The Midwest meeting of supreme lyrical talent and producorial mastery results in one of the most powerful and emotionally raw albums of Stalley’s career. He offers diaries of hood traumas and their lingering effects, formulas for overcoming systemic poverty and societal prejudice, and instructions on how to thrive as an independent artist. Brown scores every bar with soulful and melancholy beats that sound like sunlight cracking through concrete skies.

Blacklight leaves no stretch of Stalley’s journey unaccounted for. He vacillates between attaining higher consciousness and the drive to acquire everything he was deprived of in youth, bringing you to hot corners on Massillon, Ohio blocks (“No Monsters”) and explaining the grind necessary to win in the face of jealous foes and friends secretly plotting your demise (“Blacklight”). There are songs of supreme confidence full of candy-painted rides sitting on chrome (“Catch Up”), but Stalley tempers them by revealing the moments of insecurity that plague even the greatest artists (“Breathe”). Revered lyricists Skyzoo and Joell Ortiz and Power star Omari Hardwick feature to reveal pieces of their respective odysseys, their words reinforcing the core of Blacklight. In telling his story, Stalley sheds light on the lives of everyone hustling in the trenches in hopes of making it to the penthouse.