MUSIC REVIEW

NARCOPOP

Mula B

2-5-2026

Narcopop is Mula B deciding, on his fourth album, that the streets of his upbringing deserve the same artistic ambition as jazz, narcocorrido, and neomelodica and quietly making one of the most thought provoking Dutch rap records in years while doing it.

The whole argument of Narcopop is buried in its title, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it. “Narco” is the subject, the drug economy and the violence and the loneliness underneath both, and “Pop” is the delivery, melodic and accessible and built for an audience far past the underground. On his fourth album Mula B fuses the two into one of the most thought-provoking Dutch rap records in years, and he does it without once sounding like he is reaching.

He treats his own world like it deserves the work

This is the album where Mula B stops negotiating with the market and starts building a room of his own. The move underneath everything is a decision, that Schilderswijk is worthy material rather than raw spectacle, and that the streets of his upbringing deserve the same compositional ambition other genres get handed for free. Narcocorrido, the Mexican folk tradition built around drug-culture storytelling, gives the record its emotional grammar. Neomelodica, the Italian street music long written off as low art for low people, shapes its melodic instincts. Jazz, house and trap fill in the rest, and none of it plays as tourism.

That sounds like an art-school pitch until you press play, and then it just sounds like songs. That is the whole trick. He has been making this argument in interviews for years, that his neighborhood is worth the same care other worlds get for free, and the album proves it without ever stopping to spell it out. He treats you like you will catch up on your own. Most of the time you do, and the times you do not, the songs carry you anyway.

The production refuses to sit still

Rangel Silaev handles most of the boards, with Trobi and IliasOpDeBeat filling in around him, and the whole thing runs on the assumption that genre borders are an obstacle worth ignoring. Tracks shift without warning. A trap foundation cracks open into a techno break. 808s end up riding over disco. Something that starts in jazz harmony drifts toward ambient before you clock the turn. The shifts land because they mirror the writing, street life as he describes it does not sit in one emotional register, so the beat refuses to either.

If you have ever watched a long unbroken camera take change the mood of a scene without a single cut, this is that instinct aimed at a rap album. The tone evolves inside the take. You never see the seams. What holds all of it together is the voice on top. Mula B’s flow is one of the most distinctive things in Dutch rap right now, melodic but never soft, rhythmically unpredictable in a way that asks you to listen harder than the beat requires. He stretches syllables against the grain and snaps back into the pocket, builds phrases that feel structurally unstable until the final word locks everything in place. The casualness he brings to heavy material is the whole performance, and the more ordinary he makes it sound, the heavier it lands. That takes believing every word you say, and he clearly does.

The casualness he brings to heavy material is the whole performance, and the more ordinary he makes it sound, the heavier it lands.

"Wij Zijn Niet Echt" is the center of the whole thing

The song the album is built around is one of the simplest things on it, and it is the one I keep coming back to. On the surface “Wij Zijn Niet Echt,” we are not real, reads as street life, the idea that nothing in your neighborhood registers to the wider world until it becomes a crisis worth explaining, that your grief does not count until it produces a problem someone has to manage. That reading is correct, and it is the small one.

The bigger reading, the one he is reaching for, is about being a minority in a country that makes no room for you until your existence turns inconvenient. Your art does not enter the canon. Your grief does not make the news. Your food and your music and your slang are exotic right up until the moment they are suspicious. You live in the margins of a story that was never about you, until something forces the larger story to explain you in the worst possible terms. I felt this one. There is a version of that experience anyone who grew up between classes or cultures recognizes on contact, even when the specifics are nothing alike.

Silaev produces it sparse and almost hollowed out, Mula B’s vocal sitting mournful under autotune, everything maximalist about the rest of the record deliberately stripped away, because the disconnection he is describing is ordinary and ordinary does not need drama. That restraint is the most adult choice on the album, and it is the reason a track with so little going on technically ends up the heaviest thing here.

Where it loosens its grip

The back half shows some sequencing fatigue. After the emotional peak at the center, a few tracks in the final quarter feel like bridges to an ending rather than statements of their own. They are well produced and lyrically solid, they just do not carry the same weight, and the album set a high enough bar across its first forty minutes that you feel the difference the moment it arrives. Roughly twelve of sixteen tracks fully earn their runtime, which by any normal measure is a great hit rate, and by Narcopop’s own standard the closing stretch feels a little diffuse, like the argument has already been made and the record is finishing its sentence.

That is the cost of the genre-hopping too. When anything can be anything, a few of the choices come out less considered than the rest, not bad, just less essential, and the album’s greatest strength is the exact place it occasionally loses focus. That is the trade you accept when you try something this ambitious in the first place.

He stopped explaining himself

Narcopop is what a fourth album sounds like when an artist stops explaining himself and starts making demands of you. The commercial instincts from Meesterplusser are still in here, several of these songs are genuinely accessible and this is not an anti-pop statement, but they are serving something more architecturally ambitious than a chart position now. He folds Moroccan and Congolese musical DNA, Hague street slang, narcocorrido, neomelodica, trap, house and jazz into something that sounds like one person instead of a moodboard. The part I keep returning to is that he buried a real argument about visibility and belonging inside an album this catchy, and kept both alive, when most artists reaching this far drop one or the other on the way.

FINAL SCORE

90/100

VERDICT

Narcopop is imperfect in the way that comes from reaching, not settling, and it is the most ambitious Dutch rap record in years.

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