The baritone-voiced provocateur Tawobi is a lifelong writer, poet, and rapper with a penchant for high-energy performance, uncommon sampling, and straightforward social commentary. Like the most potent and relatable artists, the list of struggles he has to rap about seems endless. Tawobi’s experiences with dysfunctional family, racism, addiction, education despite his natural intelligence, mental health, homelessness, poverty, and heartbreak all converge in the mania of his music. Surviving america is a full-time job, and it takes a specific kind of courage and talent to turn that experience into art. On Rosemary’s Baby, his new LP, Tawobi channels these experiences and traits from within to craft a sophisticated yet easily accessible album.

 Philadelphia’s Taylor Thompkins grew from adolescent slam poet to independent artist collective founder by the time he was 18. This group, known as the Highest Basement Collective, was Thompkins’ gateway to creation and performance. HBC would build their skills through recording and booking their own performances. Upon completing high school and realizing that finishing college at St. John’s University wasn’t meant to be a part of his journey, Thompkins officially became Tawobi, his name being a mutation of the Cherokee word for hawk, Tawodi. Tawobi was changing rapidly during this time; he was caught in thought loops including past memories of his grandmother’s claims of their family’s Cherokee heritage, his ongoing fascination with shamanism and spirit animals, and his future aspirations for HBC. Tawobi had to simultaneously contend with honest realizations about these things; upon further investigation Tawobi found that his grandmother’s assertions of Cherokee heritage were actually a sanitized version of the ugly realities of slavery that his family endured, his thought loops were fueled by bad acid, and that interpersonal conflicts within the collective could spell its doom.
 It was all of this and more that served as inspiration for his first full length album, 2020’s F.A.T.E. (The Fish That Ate The Elephant,) an album that provided Tawobi steps into a new world of artistry. He was now making money from Bandcamp streams and the scene in Philadelphia was, across genres, undergoing a very specific cultural shift. Tawobi followed this with Who’s Smoking In The Baffroom, a collaborative album released the following year with fellow HBC artist Lord Trippy, which was released to an even more positive reception and a well-attended release party. His following EP, 2022’s 20XR, received a feature from Bandcamp.com’s editorial department but led to an even more unexpected result. Tawobi became familiar with Philadelphia’s punk scene, realizing he could play shows more frequently if he started performing with the area’s punk rockers, namely the band Nysa. This would lead to a spike in the frequency of his performances, not only with punk bands in general, but later on as the frontman of his own band Violent Highs. His physical presence was growing exponentially, further enriched by a trip to Austin, TX for SXSW the same year where he’d landed a show and finagled his way onto a taping of The Kill Tony Podcast.
 With this two year ascent bringing Tawobi around the country, including a 10 day HBC tour, the momentum around him was nothing if not encouraging. Then, 2024 brought loss, grief, and struggle. A friend of Tawobi’s was killed, and he was facing unemployment. His engagement with his music across platforms went from hitting a lull to plummeting, his bookings ceased, and his drinking increased. With his health impacted, Tawobi gave himself no choice but sobriety, and began work on what would become Rosemary’s Baby. Named for his mother, Tawobi dedicated himself to the project and meditation after a decade of substance abuse. In the past, Tawobi’s need to create was pure compulsion, but the grief of 2024 brought clarity through sobriety.
 In his own simple words,
 “I have something to say. For the other weirdos like me, for my friends, for my family and for myself. This is the start of my new life and all it cost me was the totality of the old one that I knew.”
 Rosemary’s Baby sounds like it was made by someone who has truly been to hell and back, and while the process didn’t destroy him by any means, Tawobi is definitely unafraid of his own inner madness. The album has booming 808’s and kicks, samples that go from being a song’s melodic voice to being the song itself, and features from the likes of RXK Nephew, Johnny Polygon, and J.U.S of Detroit’s Bruiser Brigade. Tawobi’s raps are maniacal, his style is certainly beholden to the rapid-fire Philadelphia tradition and is laden with adlibs, but Tawobi delivers lines in a baritone snarl that is uniquely his own. With production handled almost entirely by producer Oldman, save for two songs produced by Johnny Polygon, and mixing and mastering handled by Justin Miller and Charley Coin respectively, the songs shine with energy and high grade production.