Tierra Whack’s World Wide Whack is delirious, candy-coated turbulence

If Whack World, with its now-iconic structure of 15 tracks each running at exactly a minute long, proved a morsel of fact, it was that Whack is a person on the fast track. Each song is only long enough to shotgun an idea one after another like a frat house drinking game.

World Wide Whack quite literally extends the virtues of Whack as an artist, as the interim six years have afforded her another minute, nay, another minute-and-a-half for each idea to exist. Her songs are character portraits for children’s drawings made in art therapy: decrepit figures and emotions given a twisted smiley euphoria. The extra length of each track gives Whack the thinking space to address the root of this comical delirium: suicidal tendencies. Not the answer one might expect, especially if you’re of god’s chosen few who’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing them, but for the rest of us, its ever-presence around the humor and splendor of the record is deeply understood.

Each track will commit to Whack’s usual first minute, but suspiciously lingers on, sometimes embellishing an idea and other times letting the same moment marinate on repeat. This often does little to diminish the power of each particular song, but on the macro-level, the record is still a collection of fleeting snapshots, albeit with high resolution and long-term fidelity.

“Mood Swings” and “27 Club” are bookends like bouncers covering exits; to engage in the amusement inside, you have to let yourself in through emotional turbulence. What entertainment is found is directly proportional to how much one enjoys listening to someone’s day next to a water cooler, only if the water cooler was filled with psychedelics and that person was the spare human you’d find on the planet with something interesting to say.

Whack’s greatest capability then is not just the art of brief encounters, but also of turning mundane anxieties into blissed-out trap. This originated on her debut with her critical bug allergy manifesting into an unlikely hit, but it finds form here with the trudge of living with mental illness. Showering, seeing a movie, and imaginary friends are all a repository for both playful insight and impending doom.

As the record progresses through what phases it can in its short runtime, its theme of suicide and premature expiration become more prescient, less fitting on the surface level for quirky trap rap about shower songs. However, look past even the most bare minimum of levels and see the bigger picture; these are flashes of joy and intrigue in a world so dead and cold that even our most eccentric voices struggle with the pull, as we all do. No one, not even imaginary friends, are immune. So we enjoy what we can on the fly, with Whack and her quick hits. It’s a dying world, and there’s so little time for so much life to happen.