Nenjah Nycist, Trust One - I Hope These Gems Stay With You

From poetic street sermons to razor-sharp critiques of a world addicted to illusions, the artist spits with an urgency that demands your presence. The hooks are hypnotic, the flows unpredictable—moving between jazz-inflected cadences, boom bap grit, and funk-fueled refrains that make each track feel like an anthem for the overlooked and underestimated. Nenjah Nycist and Trust One link up with M25 music to bring you not just an album but a conversation between past wisdom and future revolution. Nenjah Nycist brings surgical lyricism, chiseled melodic harmonies, intricate wordplay reflecting struggle, triumph and lived realities of raw, underground hip hop. Trust One’s warm, analog-rich, with head-nodding drum breaks and basslines that ripple through concrete. Soulful samples weave in and out to create a listening experience that projects infinite jewels. Each feature (Kurious, Chuck Inglish, A$h, Nuse Tyrant, 90 Wyse, Cut Beetlez) is a toast to Nenjah and Trust One’s merge. This is hip hop in its purest form: raw, groovy, and intellectual. Whether it’s decoding the hidden messages laced in each rhyme or simply vibing to the weight of the bassline, *I Hope These Gems Stay With You* ensures that when the final track fades, the lessons—like the rhythm—will stay etched in the listener’s soul.

I think Brooklyn rapper Nenjah Nycist speaks for all of us when, about halfway through his collaborative LP with the producer Trust One, he raps, “None of these kids is reading books/ Think this generation’s cooked/ You might need help they just gonna look, then pull out their phones/ …weed shops on every corner, but nothing is grown/ AI, bots, and drones/ and clones/ Something is wrong.” That track perfectly captures the vibe of Hope These Gems Stay With You, a defiantly classicist hip-hop record that still prizes the things that the genre was built on: Beautifully humid production and clever, self-confident bars that side-eye weaker rappers. It also reflects one of the album’s chief concerns: That the world has gone completely sideways. Tracks like “Built For This”—which features a tongue-twisting verse from Nuse Tyrant—use deceptively joyous choruses as a cover for nervous verses. (On that specific track, the refrain “A lot of y’all ain’t built for this” offset bars about desperation and betrayal.) The album is packaged in a variety of clever “Treasure Chest” bundles that come with not only the record on gold cassette, but also an assortment of actual gems & minerals. Given the state of the world Nenjah raps about throughout Gems, you might want to hold on to those—they could end up being valuable currency.

J. Edward Keyes

All Lyrics Written By Nenjah Nycist Except Featured Artists
Produced By Trust One
Mixed & Mastered By Nenjah Nycist @Dojostudios1235
Cover Art By Greg Comics
Ultimate Treasure Chest Box Art by Ghostvolume & Trust One