Eight tracks — and you realize someone has spent the last few years alone with a notebook, a microphone, and their own head. Raw Soul puts out Still High…, and the first thing that hooks you is that this record sounds like the person behind it genuinely does not care whether anyone hears it. Does not care in the good, rare sense: there is an internal completeness here that is impossible to fake. When an artist writes music for the charts, you can hear it in the seams — in the way a song rushes toward the hook, in the way the beat cranks the volume for a TikTok-ready snippet. Still High… has an entirely different gravity. The record pulls inward, rather than outward. It talks to you, and sometimes falls silent mid-sentence, and the pause works too.

Nearly a decade of relentless work — and here is the result: a project where faith, struggle, and ambition are packed into twenty-odd minutes so organically that you stop noticing the seams between tracks. The arc of the record — from quiet confidence to vulnerability, through ascent, to a final sweep — reads as a whole, like a single thought expressed without haste. J. Cole at his finest could do exactly this: talk about ordinary things — self-belief, exhaustion, stubbornness — and still sound specific, direct, personal. Raw Soul operates in a similar register, but his voice belongs to him alone, and mistaking it for someone else’s would be difficult.

Run Free opens the EP with nocturnal street energy; the production by ARVM Beats builds a portrait of the metropolis — streetlights, asphalt, motion. The track is brisk yet cool: there is no performative excitement here, more the focused stride of someone who knows the route. The song earns its place as the opener — it sets the tone, marks the territory, makes clear what language the conversation ahead will be conducted in. And that conversation promises to be direct.

The promise holds: Still High hits even harder, even bolder, the lyrics going all in. The candor here sounds earned — it leans on context that Raw Soul has been building across years of his discography. When a person has put out a seventh, a tenth, a fifteenth release, the honesty in his bars acquires a weight that a fresh artist still has to accumulate. That weight is felt physically.

And then In Need (of Healing) eases off the throttle. The production by eeryskies is rainy, slowed down, carrying a kind of beautiful overcast quality. A song about goals, about how healing is a goal too — and perhaps the hardest one. The EP is full of strong moments, but In Need (of Healing) stands apart: it has that melodic pensiveness that makes you rewind and listen again.

Skyscrapers, once more on beats by eeryskies, is a manifesto track. Raw Soul speaks of himself as living proof that forward motion is possible, that perseverance is a working strategy. Dangerous territory for any songwriter: it is easy to slide into a motivational poster. But Raw Soul holds the line, because his confidence sounds hard-won. There is a biography behind the words, and you feel it — in the timbre, in the way phrases land on the beat with the weary precision of someone who had been saying this to himself in the mirror long before he turned on the microphone.

Perseverance, produced by pilotkid, is laid-back, relaxed, with bass lines that vibrate through the diaphragm. The track shifts the register: after the manifesto comes a breather, but a deliberate one. The bass here is a full participant — it creates a space where Raw Soul‘s voice can exist freely, without the need to shout over the arrangement.

I’m Going (Letting Go) drops the BPM even lower and moves into openly cinematic territory. If the record has a soundtrack moment, this is it. The track sounds like the final scene of a film where the camera slowly pulls away and the protagonist walks down a road, and you understand that the story is over but life continues. eeryskies appears on the EP for the third time — and each time brings something different: rain in In Need (of Healing), verticality in Skyscrapers, and now a cinematic depth. A producer’s signature that knows how to adapt to the artist’s mood is a valuable thing.

Lenses, produced by bvtman, is monotone, heavy, foggy. A track that at first seems the least accessible on the record. It demands patience. It demands that you sit down, put on headphones, and give it room. And here lies the paradox: Lenses turns out to be the hidden gem of the entire EP. The heaviness works in service of depth; the monotony produces a hypnotic effect. The song gets under your skin slowly, but it gets there firmly. After two or three listens you catch yourself humming the melody in the shower and wonder — when did that happen?

To Whom it May Concern closes the record, and closes it with force. pilotkid is back on the production, and the final track sounds exactly the way a finale should: with a sense of closure and, at the same time, an open horizon.

If you go looking for a weak spot — and you always want to find one, because truly flawless records do not really exist — you could say that eight tracks leave you hungry. You want more. You want to hear Raw Soul working with other producers, at other tempos, in other emotional registers. But that is probably where the strength of Still High… lies: the record gives exactly as much as it needs to and exits before it overstays its welcome. The discipline of brevity is a skill in its own right, and knowing how to wield it matters.

Still High… sounds the way a person sounds who has stopped chasing recognition and started living inside the process. Nearly a decade of quiet, serious work is audible in every production choice, in the way the record breathes — unhurried, assured, with the dignity of someone who finds what he does to be enough. For fans of J. Cole, early Kendrick, for anyone who believes that rap can hold the full weight of a human life with all its breaking points and quiet victories — Still High… deserves a complete, attentive listen from start to finish.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub