SOB X RBE - Gangin (2LP)

SOB X RBE’s Gangin landed on 23 February 2018 through their own imprint with EMPIRE, and it still crackles with the kind of energy that makes you miss the feeling of a first play on good speakers. The Vallejo crew were already buzzing off Paramedic!, their snarling showcase on the Black Panther soundtrack curated by Kendrick Lamar and Top Dawg. Two weeks later, this debut album arrived and proved that the lightning wasn’t a one-off. It’s the sound of a young Bay Area group stepping into a national spotlight without sanding down a single rough edge.

What hits first is the chemistry. Yhung T.O. brings the melodies, the singer’s ear, the glide. DaBoii and Slimmy B bite down on every bar, all bark and precision, and Lul G ties it together with a steady, grounded presence. You can hear how much time they spent rapping together, trading lines like cousins at a backyard party, each voice distinct but wired to the same pulse. It’s classic North Bay attitude, jumpy and playful and tense at once, shaped by hyphy’s bounce and the region’s love of trunk-rattling low end.

Carpoolin became the instant calling card, a pure Bay slap built on slithering synths and a hook that sticks. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it just spins it fast, and the whole group takes turns leaning out the passenger window with grins and threats. The production across Gangin keeps things lean like that. Beats snap, bass thumps, space opens up for the voices to cut through. When T.O. slides into a hook that could float on mainstream radio, the drums never soften, and when the others go jagged, he answers with melody that feels like home cooking. That tension is the album’s engine.

A big part of the charm is how unvarnished it all feels. You can tell these songs weren’t workshopped to death in some sterile LA room. The mixes are punchy, not glossy. The punchlines come quick, some tossed off like in-jokes, others landing with that Bay Area sense of comic menace. If you grew up on Mac Dre, The Jacka or early E-40, you’ll hear the lineage, but Gangin doesn’t cosplay a bygone era. It’s 2018 to the core, wired to YouTube and group chats, ready-made for backyard speakers or a late-night Uber run.

Their moment on Paramedic! matters to this record too, not because it overshadows it, but because it sharpened their focus. The album acts like a mission statement afterward. Where the soundtrack cut introduced them to anyone who didn’t already have SOB X RBE in heavy rotation, Gangin shows the range: the joy of bouncing off your mates, the rush of a hook, a little melody, plenty of bark. Outlets like Pitchfork and The Fader took notice and treated the album as a serious arrival, not just a viral blip.

For the heads who chase pressings, Gangin vinyl is worth hunting down. The bass and the clipped snares do real work on wax, and there’s something right about hearing this through a proper setup. If you dig through a Melbourne record store and catch a copy tucked in the hip-hop bin, don’t leave it behind. Same goes if you prefer to buy SOB X RBE records online, since stock can disappear quick. There aren’t mountains of SOB X RBE albums on vinyl, which only makes this one feel more like a score for anyone collecting modern Bay rap in vinyl records Australia circles.

The story kept moving fast. Later in 2018 they dropped Gangin II, a sign of both the group’s momentum and their work rate. But it’s Gangin that feels like the snapshot people will come back to, that charged moment when four distinct voices from Vallejo sounded like one unit, just loose enough to be dangerous. Even if you came in through Paramedic!, this album is the better doorway into what made SOB X RBE special as a group.

Spin it and you’ll hear why this captured so many ears in such a short burst. No wasted motion, no fake polish, just sharp verses, sticky hooks and beats designed to make car doors rattle. If you’re crate-digging and spot SOB X RBE vinyl, grab it, and if you’re building a cart and looking to buy SOB X RBE records online, make sure Gangin sits on top.