S. Raekwon

Steven Raekwon Reynolds performs as S. Raekwon, but his second LP is simply called Steven. Across 10 tracks of furious and subtly strumming guitars, groovy bass riffs, and whispering revelations, S. Raekwon’s newest album strips back sonic and personal layers to present his most vulnerable, yet authentic self.

Still, stage names can be masks of sorts, creating distance between art and artists themselves. A bi-racial, multi-hyphenate born in Buffalo and now based in the East Village of New York City, Steven wrote, produced, engineered, and mixed everything on the record, in addition to playing every instrument except the drums. Mastered by Heba Kadry (Kara Jackson, serpentwithfeet, L'Rain), Steven sounds exposed and immediate, a palpable evolution from S. Raekwon’s 2021 debut album Where I’m at Now and 2022 EP I Like It When You Smile.

To achieve this, Steven packed up a rental car with all his gear and returned to his fiancée’s parents’ home in Southern Illinois, where they rode out the pandemic and where he recorded half of Where I’m at Now. The house, more than 100 years old, proved to be a nontraditional recording space, but one that provided plenty of physical space as well as spiritual room for experimentation.

Steven and drummer Mario Malachi, longtime friends since their college days in Cleveland, Ohio, spent a week in July 2023 transforming the living room into a makeshift studio, rearranging furniture, sitting face-to-face in front of a mic, and tracking songs in single takes. It was a new way of working together; Mario hadn’t heard any music before the sessions, which created a sense of spontaneity and improvisation for the duo.

Even the writing process was a change for Steven. Mostly written between 2022 and 2023, some of the musical ideas date back to 2018. On earlier projects, the writing, recording, and production almost always took place simultaneously. But for Steven, he wanted the songs to be able to stand on their own, independent of the production. He composed on guitar and sat with the music, revisiting chords, lyrics, and melodies until he felt they were complete. Each song carried a weight, a purpose, he says. “I constantly asked myself when writing: ‘What are the stakes?’ Every song needed to tell a story, or to serve the broader story of the record.”

As they were recording, though, Steven realized the songs offered a certain structural organization. At first, it seemed just musical: The first third bobs and sways with rock, blues, and soul influences. Lead track and lead single “Steven’s Smile,” sets the upbeat mood with a sprinkling of keys from an old Baldwin piano, leading into the head-bopping falsetto of “Old Thing,” and the steady groove of “Winners & Losers.” The middle section, featuring the gut-wrenching centerpiece “If There Is No God…” stretches and soars, showcasing Steven’s vocals — at times hushed and at other times heavy — at the forefront of the mix. The final third settles into an oft-acoustic, singer-songwriter quietude, carried by the off-kilter waltz “What Love Makes You Do.”

Sitting with the final songs, Steven realized that they seemed to coalesce thematically as well. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself.” He elaborates, “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you're a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Posing in pensive tricolor on the album cover, Steven could be conveying a range of emotions — curious, patient, regretful, insecure, annoyed, tolerant, understanding. Rather, his neutral expression and body language seems to express all of those complexities and nuances of human existence and more.

Taken as a whole, Steven doesn’t just offer snapshots in song. Baring himself in full musical honesty across the album, S. Raekwon attempts to bridge the gap between the art and the artist. It’s a portrait of strengths and weaknesses, flaws, and fulfillments. “Steven is the sound of me holding a mirror up to and critically reflecting on who I am — the good, the bad, the ugly,” he says. “It’s about trying to understand the multitudes within me.”