South African wordsmith Serunya Richard Moloi, popularly known as Priddy Ugly, has taken his final step – or is it? – in what has been an enlightening pilgrimage in the rap game. Teaming up with STAYLOW and Ditto Music once again, Serunya’s last album, aptly titled DUST, is more than just an audio anthology of finely-woven kasi narratives, it’s a tapestery-esque prophecy in which he lends himself as a vessel of the soil to look back on the past as a way to paint pictures of what the future should look like.
With fourteen tracks on the LP, DUST is a rugged climb from the album opener “Falling” to the summit of “Go On [Outro]”, the terrain of the tape being predominately trap beats catering to Priddy’s lyrical inclination. The guest list includes poetic potters with paper such as ZuluMecca, Thato Saul, Tyson Sybateli, and Maglera Doe Boy, and the production personnel includes SAMA-winning producer MashBeatz, ShooterKhumz, Herc Cut the Lights, among others.
The 51-minute spectacle features themes spun from life lessons, betrayals, the meaning of birth and death, family dynamics, and existential questions of what it means to be and grow as a man. With the extensive use of poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, and enjambment, dust – extrapolated from the album title itself – is the controlling metaphor that glues all themes into one vignette-rich collage. From start to finish, DUST encapsulates the Biblical truism found throughout the project: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return”.
Among the highlights of the album is “Rest In Power”, a tribute to all the fallen legends ranging from AKA and CitiLyts to Costa Titch and Riky Rick. In the song, Moloi questions the necessary evil of death, wondering what the meaning of it is and what divine lessons could be extracted from such tragic events. “NTJA’KA” and the Tyson Sybateli-assisted “So Disrespectful” finds him at his most fluent with the words, fusing his worldly wisdom with spiritual masculinity to present himself as a formidable thinker under all the hedonism.
On DUST, Priddy Ugly is as sombre as he is downright silly when he gives himself permission to be, which is rarely. Mixing up the gravity that comes from the human experience with the search for meaning in the crevices of life where so much gets lost, the lyricist not only details his own stories through the kasi lens, his understanding is cosmopolitan enough to speak to the hearts of audiences that might never know what it’s like to get a “ticket for spinning a Civic.”
Listen to DUST:
