symphony splits Jersey Club like an atom”>
There are levels to Maajins. In his most public-facing side, he’s a 17-year-old rapper and producer from New Jersey with cotton-candy sweet vocals wrapped around mischievous lyrics: “Way I throw that bitch out like I’m Pat Mahomes,” he sings on his 2025 single “dont try this @ home” with the sincerity and urgency of a promposal. Throughout the two-and-a-half full-length projects released last year (Ivy. and Enjoy The Ride, plus the latter’s deluxe), Maajins displays a preternatural sense of melody, genre collision, and sheer style, refining qualities present since he began releasing music in 2022. This is the Maajins that has the potential to plant a flag in mainstream rap for years to come — but on his SoundCloud archive @maaj, Maajins hosts tapes like symphony, aggressive reconstructions of Jersey Club that stick to your brain like napalm.
While little if any of the club music on @maaj is distributed outside of the SoundCloud page, Maajins will occasionally dabble in Jersey Club on his official singles. “matchmyracks” from April 2023, with its concussed, crystalline notes behind the familiar 808 drum patterns, demonstrates how Maajins’ loyalty to the genre and desire to innovate it coexist perfectly. “It’s not even like this is a trend,” he said during a 2024 On The Radar interview when his @Maaj archive came up in conversation. “Jersey Club has been thriving since before my existence.” Still, he was aware that he had something Jersey Club purists might not recognize. “It’s a lot of people that won’t get it and it’s a lot of people that is like mind-blown… it just hit different.”
symphony, released on March 17, is Jersey Club rendered as the soundtrack for a dancing plague: full of deeply human impulses colliding with unexplainable mayhem. Listening all the way through is an all-consuming experience for your consciousness; in that sense, it’s a descendent of “epic collage” artists like Chino Amobi and Chuquimamani-Condori, who also seek to pierce the veil between worlds with inspired samples sharpened into daggers. But the beats on symphony give it a more definite structure, and thanks to Jersey Club’s relatively recent chart presence, tie it to modern pop.
That union is as chaotic as it is unexpectedly effortless. Opening track “yea u” opens with a phased-out wash and a Scarface sample of Tony Montana screaming bloody murder (a recurring motif on symphony) spiralling into DEFCON-5 synths and gunshots that bleed into the drum patterns themselves. It’s one of the most intense moments on the project, perhaps intentionally placed at the front to get the nonbelievers out early; it’s rivaled only by the crazed carnival sounds of “guns? money?” and “idgafniga,” a song so compressed and distorted that it seems like the experiment’s test tubes are about to explode.
True to its name, symphony understands how difference can be a key to cohesion. The overwhelming abrasiveness helps the relatively softer elements stand out: the sunny reggae sample on “like a book,” spiked and sped-up; Beyoncé’s honeyed gibberish on “beamer.”; the glowing Nujabes synths of “enemies” surrounded by what sounds like Street Fighter announcements. Such moments aren’t life rafts, but smaller waves in the same ocean.
Some will regard the music on symphony as impudent muzak for a brainrotted underground, but it contains the same thing that all of Maajins’ music does: dedication. “had 2 go bck 2 my roots rq,” he wrote in the SoundCloud caption for “matchmyracks.” Whereas that song was more mindful of tradition, symphony is focused on finding unexpected harmonies within the maelstrom of Hurricane Maajins, taking unions that in lesser hands would clash, smelting them together until they turn as red as a peaking audio signal, and forging something new. It’s a solid foundation for Maajins’ entire discography that sounds like an earthquake tearing it all down.
