For more than a decade, Dahi has occupied one of the most powerful positions in modern hip-hop without ever needing to stand at the centre of the picture. He is the person behind the curtain, building the rooms in which other artists could become larger versions of themselves. Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees,” 21 Savage’s “a lot,” Vince Staples’ “Lift Me Up” and a catalogue of work stretching across hip-hop, R&B and pop established him as a producer capable of making other people’s ideas sound inevitable.
His debut, Black Boy (Alternative), has an unusual question attached to it, what happens when the person who has spent years creating the atmosphere finally has to become the subject? The answer is an album that feels less like a producer’s attempt to become a frontman and more like an excavation of the musical forces that made Dahi in the first place. Hip-hop sits beside alternative rock, West African rhythms sit beside soul, guitars stretch across songs like connective tissue, and vulnerability is allowed to exist without being dressed up as weakness. This is Dahi stepping into the frame, but he does so on his own terms.
Black Boy (Alternative) cover art | SUPPLIED
The album’s title is perhaps the clearest entry point into understanding what Dahi is attempting. Black Boy (Alternative) is not simply a genre description; it is a statement about the contradiction of growing up with multiple musical languages and refusing to accept that they have to remain separate. Dahi’s childhood relationship with hip-hop and R&B existed alongside his fascination with Oasis, Blur, The Verve, Massive Attack and eventually Radiohead. That tension is the album’s creative engine. The guitars are not there to make a Black album sound “alternative,” nor are the African influences deployed as some obligatory cultural stamp. They feel like memories being placed next to one another until they begin to reveal a pattern. You hear the looseness of African grooves meeting the angularity of alternative rock, live instrumentation meeting electronic manipulation, and traditional ideas of musicianship meeting the possibilities of studio production. The result is an album that sounds deeply Black without being interested in performing Blackness according to a single musical template.
What makes the record particularly compelling is Dahi’s understanding of the producer as an author. Producers are often treated as invisible infrastructure in popular music, important when their beats are recognisable but secondary once the vocalist enters. Dahi turns that hierarchy inside out. His greatest instrument throughout Black Boy (Alternative) is not necessarily the guitar, bass, drums or synthesiser individually, but the space between them. The arrangements breathe. Rhythms occasionally stumble rather than resolve neatly. Guitars can sound warm and human before becoming abrasive, while percussion creates movement without constantly demanding attention. On “WHO ARE YOU,” Vince Staples, Channel Tres and French Anthony are given enough room to inhabit the track rather than simply decorate it. “HOW TO PRAY” brings Kendrick Lamar and Amber Mark into a much more vulnerable environment, while “DROWNING” gives Ravyn Lenae and Elmiene a landscape spacious enough for the song to feel like a final exhale. Dahi’s achievement is knowing when not to interfere. He has spent years learning how to make other people sound like themselves, and here that skill is the foundation of his own artistic identity.
Check out “HOW TO PRAY”:
There is also something quietly radical about the way Black Boy (Alternative) approaches masculinity. The album is filled with men asking questions they are usually expected to answer themselves. “WHO ARE YOU” is not simply an existential opener, it establishes the record’s central tension between the person a man is expected to become and the person he actually is. “HOW TO PRAY” moves vulnerability toward love and faith, while “SQUARE UP” confronts the destructive version of toughness that can become a prison of its own. Even the album’s more reflective moments are rarely presented as clean resolutions. The men here are confused, wounded, ambitious, jealous, hopeful and sometimes afraid. That makes the album feel less like a collection of statements and more like a series of conversations about becoming. Dahi does something particularly effective with his collaborators, instead of using their star power to overwhelm the record, he uses their different perspectives to construct a larger portrait of Black identity.
The album is even richer when considered through its relationship with place and ancestry. Dahi grew up in Los Angeles, but Black Boy (Alternative) repeatedly reaches toward West Africa through the music he inherited from his father. That connection is never treated as a museum piece. It is not nostalgia for a homeland experienced entirely through memory. Instead, it becomes part of the vocabulary through which Dahi understands himself as a Black American artist. This is where the album’s alternative-rock influence becomes particularly significant.
Dahi | SUPPLIED
Rock music, especially its British and American histories, has often been separated from conversations about Black musical identity despite the genre’s deep Black origins. Dahi refuses that separation. His version of “alternative” is therefore not simply about sound, it is a refusal of the categories that tell Black artists which musical rooms belong to them. The guitar is a bridge between continents, generations and identities. What could have been an exercise in genre experimentation instead becomes an argument for cultural coexistence. Still, Black Boy (Alternative) is not without its imperfections. Its conceptual ambition can occasionally make the listening experience feel more cerebral than immediate, and the sheer number of collaborators sometimes means Dahi’s own presence is difficult to locate. That is an interesting problem for a producer who has spent his career disappearing into the work of others. The album can feel like a brilliantly curated exhibition in which the curator occasionally becomes harder to find than the artists on the walls. But that tension is also central to the project. Dahi is not suddenly pretending that his greatest strength is being the loudest voice in the room. He is building a world and allowing other people to move through it. The result means some songs will connect more immediately than others, but the album rewards attention because its details accumulate. A guitar line, a change in rhythm, an unexpected vocal texture or a lyrical idea can completely alter the emotional temperature of a song. This is not music designed to reveal everything on the first listen.
Dahi | SUPPLIED
Black Boy (Alternative) feels like Dahi answering a question that has followed him throughout his career, who is the person behind all those sounds? The answer is not a neat biography. It is a collage. It is a Black boy from Los Angeles who heard hip-hop and British rock as equally formative, who inherited West African music through family, who learned to communicate through production before deciding that he had something personal to say, and who understands collaboration as an act of trust rather than competition. The album’s greatest accomplishment is therefore not that Dahi has finally stepped into the spotlight. It is that he has brought the spotlight with him and pointed it toward all the contradictions that shaped him.
Black Boy (Alternative) is an album about identity without sounding trapped by identity, an album about Blackness without reducing it to a single experience, and an album about artistic freedom made by someone who spent years making freedom possible for everyone else. Dahi may have spent the 2010s helping other artists find their sound. On his debut, he finally sounds like he has found his own.
Preview the album:
