There are projects that play by the rules, slotting neatly into genres and playlists, and then there are projects like THE DEATH OF R&B MIXTAPE 2: CHANGELING. WYCH HAZLE isn’t just releasing music here; he’s staging an exorcism. This is R&B stripped of its silky polish, set on fire, and reassembled as something jagged, haunted, and defiantly alive. If mainstream R&B has been accused of coasting on “vibes,” CHANGELING is here to prove that the genre still has teeth. Think Frank Ocean if he was raised on horror films and protest chants, or JPEGMAFIA holding mass in a cathedral where the organ’s been rewired with drum machines.
Where the first Death of R&B mixtape hinted at revolt, CHANGELING is the full-on insurrection. WYCH HAZLE approaches the genre less as a stylistic container and more as a contested battlefield. Love, loss, cultural erasure, and rebirth aren’t just themes here; they’re weapons. The mixtape interrogates what R&B even means in 2025, tearing it away from streaming-service playlist-core and grounding it back in urgency. Every track feels like it was written with blood in the margins. Every beat sounds like it’s about to collapse under its own weight.
WYCH isn’t shy about his mission either. His voice cuts through the fog with the clarity of someone who isn’t trying to charm you, but to wake you up. This is insurgent R&B, an album-length refusal to be background noise. The sound of CHANGELING is fractured, eerie, and purposeful in its imperfections. Producers like SunAshay and the rising underground cohort turn R&B’s glossy lineage inside out. Instead of lush strings and soft synth pads, we get distorted gospel loops that sound like they’ve been dragged through a storm drain, drum programming that rattles like broken appliances, and moments of silence that feel more like suffocating anticipation than rest.
Take “Special Report”, the opening track. It begins like a news bulletin beamed from a ruined world: vocal snippets crackle over a static-filled loop before WYCH enters, already in sermon mode. By the time the drums kick in, you realize this isn’t a warm welcome. It’s a declaration of war. “Close Encounter” follows with woozy synths and vocals buried under distortion, as if WYCH is phoning in from another dimension. “Numbers” dials up the paranoia; its jagged beat stumbles forward like a machine glitching in real time, while the lyrics tackle commodification and identity as if they’re inseparable battles. This isn’t music you relax to; it’s music you reckon with.
The centerpiece, though, is “The Changeling.” With SunAshay and ShenAura in tow, WYCH frames metamorphosis as both blessing and curse: to change is to survive, but to survive is to constantly be misrecognized. The track moves like an exorcism in progress, cycling through moods as if shedding skins in real time. The most surprising collaboration comes on “The Greats,” with a beat from 9th Wonder (credited here under Bladie Mae). Over the skeletal boom-bap structure, WYCH interrogates lineage: who gets remembered as “great,” and who gets erased? It’s less homage and more cross-examination, a rare track where hip-hop’s golden-age warmth collides with the mixtape’s otherwise haunted palette.
By the time we arrive at “Name Game,” the project feels like it has completed its ritual. Names become battlegrounds; labels that confine, erase, or distort. WYCH plays with repetition, distortion, and echoes until language itself starts to dissolve. It’s a fitting finale: after so much confrontation, we’re left with the debris of words themselves, haunting us like ghosts.
DEATH OF R&B MIXTAPE 2: CHANGELING is not an easy listen, nor is it meant to be. It’s jagged where most R&B is smooth, defiant where most is seductive. Yet in its rawness, it feels truer to the spirit of rhythm and blues than many of its safer, more polished contemporaries. WYCH HAZLE doesn’t want to soundtrack your commute; he wants to make you stop, sit in discomfort, and reconsider what this genre can mean.
If the mainstream trajectory of R&B is toward easy-listening playlists, WYCH plants a flag in the opposite direction. CHANGELING isn’t nostalgic; it’s insurgent. It’s not “bringing R&B back” so much as dragging it forward through the fire, reshaping it into something that can still confront, unsettle, and inspire.
It’s messy, uneven, and at times overwhelming but that’s exactly the point. Like any true exorcism, it leaves you shaken, haunted, but somehow cleansed. WYCH HAZLE hasn’t just made a mixtape; he’s built an altar, and every track is an offering. The question isn’t whether you like it. The question is whether you’re ready to survive it.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
