If anyone is deserving of a Chicago Reader cover it’s Tree. Having flown under the radar for the past few years, Tree is now having the best year ever — and rightfully so. MTV weighed in, and Spin agrees. However, nothing is quite like that hometown love, and Tree brings it full circle with this feature in this week’s edition of the Chicago Reader. This underground hero won’t be below the surface for much longer, so read this piece and act like you’ve been down since day one.
Says Leor Galil:
It’s especially odd that so many fans and critics have slept on Tree, considering that Chicago hip-hop is all the rage thanks to teenage phenom Chief Keef and the east-side drill scene. Maybe that’s because the drill sound—a moody, apocalyptic spin on the bombastic southern subgenre called “trap”—has so little to do with Johnson’s style. Drill is minimalist and almost static in its aggression, but Tree’s music is subtle and complex, with more flexibility, more melody, and more flow—you can hear bits of soul and R&B tangled in its DNA.
Johnson built Sunday School largely out of samples, often from classic soul songs, but his technique departs from the usual blueprint. He chops them up, processes them, and pieces them together, using odd edits and slight dissonances, so that they interweave and overlap in a way that can feel slightly “off,” though they’re never actually out of time with his lean, pulsing drum patterns. The effect is almost the opposite of a head-nodding groove—its strangeness, instability, and tension is a big part of what makes Johnson’s music so magnetic. “He broke down the way that you make a sample-based rap record,” Nosnitsky says, “and rebuilt it from scratch.”
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