The internet has a funny way of distorting our sense of time. When Chester Watson debuted in the mid-2010s with verbose, technically precise music indebted to MF DOOM, Earl Sweatshirt, and more obscure artists from the stratosphere and the blogosphere, it was as if he was simultaneously from the past and future. Enterprising fans reacted accordingly. Before he was old enough to legally drink, there were “Best Of,” rarities compilations, and .zip files floating through the ether like secret handshakes. Whenever industry prospectors earmarked him as the next big thing, he disappeared back underground, only to reemerge sharper, leaner, weirder. 

In his mid-twenties, the St. Louis-born rapper and producer, who grew up between that city, Georgia, and Florida, has seen enough for several lifetimes—and raps as if he’s tapped into many more. But after a few years of highs, lows, and traumatic odysseys, he was able to stare straight into the abyss and conquer it. The regained confidence is exhibited on his latest album, fish don’t climb trees, the largely self-produced opus that affirms him as one of rap’s great auteurs.  

The willingness to both expand his repertoire laterally and dive deeper down each rabbit hole has made Watson’s one of the most quietly rewarding catalogs in hip-hop. In the last half-decade, he’s released Project 0, the apex predator version of the style that he’d been tinkering with since his breakthrough a decade ago on the heady 10-million-plus streaming “Phantom.” There was A Japanese Horror Film, the full-length album from 2020 that sounds like a small team of assassins being trained in the art of hypnosis, and the following year’s glitchy, percussive EP 1997.

Any informed observer would have him on a short list of the genre’s most promising young voices. And they have: Complex hailed him as “one of the best new musicians.” Pitchfork said he is comfortably and skillfully amongst his influences that he already feels like their peer.” Pigeons and Planes named him one of “Best 20 artists Under 20.”  Vice hailed “his eloquent diction, arcane vocabulary and seemingly effortless ability to stack internal and end rhymes.” And his work has appeared in Adult Swim’s Singles series.

A master of the art of surrealist psychedelic music, he writes baleful hymns and bleak parables. He has re-imagined himself as a cursed Black Pharaoh covered in golden scarabs, an enigma with wings, suffused with Eastern philosophy and skateboards,  a new anti-hero with venom, a ballet-dancing beast hallucinating on ayahuasca. Step into these animated underworld dreams, chess-master equations, gorgeous broken mosaics to piece back together for eternity.