In the summer of 2022, Victony stood in a COLORS box just over a year after the April 2021 car crash that killed a friend and left him in a wheelchair. He sang about the scars on his right hand. “Higher powers watch over my soul,” the hook went, “’cause it’s a very lonely ride, I know.” He later told The FADER that “Many Man” was “a song of thanksgiving to God,” and the COLORS take is still the only version of it.
This evening he went back, and this time he brought a song about Gucci shoes and Cameroon pepper.
“2FRESH,” the ninth track on his August album Starlife, opens on a stacked choir singing “la-ra-ra” with nothing underneath. Eight seconds in, a rolling log drum and a hard kick land together, a clipped shaker pattern ticks over the top, and Victony settles into a low, conversational bounce. The lines arrive like jokes he has been saving: “One milli for your footstep / Gucci shoe, too fresh,” then “Your body hot like Cameroon pepper,” answered with a deadpan “you verified” and “Elon Musk give am blue check.” In a black long-sleeve, a cap pushed to one side and a heavy silver chain, he barely leaves the middle of the plum-coloured platform. He sways, throws up a peace sign when the beat drops, and halfway through covers his face with his hand to stop a line too filthy to finish. The set ends the same way, cutting off “Your body hot like…” for a whispered “too fresh.”
The distance between the two visits is the one Victony has been describing all year. “For the longest, I used to always see it as a job; like we have to do this, we have to do that,” he told The Native a week before Starlife came out. “I think just giving myself the grace, like, I’m also human.” He called the album “becoming,” the record where he finally lets his personality into the songs. “2FRESH” was built that loosely. He told Clash that the producer, Ben10k, walked into the session talking about FakeMink and wanting to try jerk sounds: “He laid the drums, I sang the melodies, and we just built it up from there.”
Not everyone is sold on the lightness, and PopMatters pointed out that Starlife carries two songs called “FRE$H” and “2FRESH,” “which tells you something about how deep the well goes.” COLORS gives an artist one song and a coloured wall, so the pick says what he wants on the record. Four years ago that was a prayer over a body still healing. Today it is a man laughing at his own lines, fully aware of how close he came to not getting the chance.