Dean: Jehnova is getting even better

Jehnova should be international by now. But the world doesn’t always appreciate the gifted, especially those who break the rules and defy all logic.

Take the rapper’s decision to drop IOU 3 five days before Christmas. It was a piece of scheduling that risked the album getting lost amid the rush of end-of-year lists and general lack of appetite for new music during the holidays. But the passage of two months makes IOU 3 no less interesting to grapple with – not when it’s a project that feels snatched out of time, independent from all recent trends, flawless in its fundamentals.

For six years, Jehnova, a South Africa-born and Dublin-raised member of the group NUXSENSE, has forged a separate but fractured solo career. A planned album titled St. Ivy doesn’t appear to have materialized; for a time, he was aligned with DFL Records, leading to some excellent collaborations with deep-voiced hip-hop balladeer Nealo but little else. Along the way there’s been numerous singles, a few EPs, plus Avenoir, a 13-minute joint release with producer lod released in 2021. But Jehnova’s discography has remained sparse; no breakthrough has come.

Finally, the creative dam is bursting. IOU 3 was Jehnova’s third album of 2024 after IOU 5 (the numbering system implemented on these releases appears to have no logic) and PCE GOD, a project with beats solely provided by his NUXSENSE confrère Luthorist, a talented and charismatic rapper in his own right. Considered together, it’s a mad and murky rush of netherworld dispatches, opiate hallucinations, and jousts with the devil; cracked extracts from forbidden ancient scripture.

These albums are short and concise, with each giving a slightly different spin on the Jehnova formula. Crucially, they form the basis of an oeuvre. This nu-savant has always had the talent, but as Chris Rock once said of the often unproductive D’Angelo, “Body of work, babe. It’s all body of work at the end of the day.” At last, the rapper I’ve always said has the potential to be Ireland’s greatest is beginning to exhibit himself.

​​Above all else, new Jehnova music is a clinic in stylish and inventive rapping. Each release is a full clip of dense, tongue-twisting verses kicked with the precision of a samurai’s swordplay. On “Vagabond”, from PCE GOD, a horn sample hangs heavy in the atmosphere, but Jehvona’s flow, so lithe and nimble, brings a sense of levity.

The wordplay is frequently dazzling; the images are vibrant. On “Stupid Games”, from IOU 5, he invokes the image of rainwater as a nutrient for his (artistic) growth while flexing his “agility to reach the touch of the all-knowing”. Most of the time, Jehnova just seems to take pleasure in contorting language: “Chiselled from the orange dust, peeling from the skin of lust”, he raps on “Dust”. These are the bottomless rhymes of the restless mind. As claimed on the jazzy “Chrome Heart”, “I put the ink in the paper, the song write itself”.

He’s also skilled at synthesising his broad interests into his music in inventive ways. There is “Salem Trial”, which is taken from an EP titled Viceroy, also released last year. The song uses the famous witch-hunt as a jump-off to discuss faith and religion. The intro to IOU 5 is what appears to be an old South African news piece covering the Apartheid-era displacement of millions of people over a Giorgio Moroder-style shroud of dark-edged 1980s synths. These flourishes add to the sense of purpose, of meaning bubbling under the surface.

Many Jehnova songs feature simple but heavy drums and hard-edged psychedelics. While rap’s current laureate of mist, Earl Sweatshirt, has previously been the clearest predecessor to his style – the gritty atmospherics, the internal rhyme patterns, the mystique – Jehnova’s latest album, IOU 3, moves further back in time by summoning the sounds of the 1990s. Much of this can be attributed to DjM-1, a Dublin producer with a firm grasp of classic sounds, who helms every song.

The result of their union is 10 songs and 25 minutes (Jehnova’s longest project to date) of elite rapping over back-in-the-day beats. The album’s atmosphere is loose and vibey, like a late-night living room smoke session with empty cans as ashtrays. Nostalgia is everywhere. When Jehnova raps “Sleep is the cousin of grief” on “Back Alley”, it’s impossible not to read it as a reference to Nas’s famous declaration, “Sleep is the cousin of death”. And as soon as you hear the clip of what appears to be MF DOOM in conversation that begins “Sentinel”, you know Jehnova has no interest in hiding his influences. In fact, the record shares not just DOOM’s penchant for intricate rhymes, but zany audio loops. “Amnesia” includes clips from what sounds like a vintage American TV melodrama of a man suffering memory loss, scouring his body, accent and possessions for clues to his identity.

IOU 3 buttoned up a highly successful year for Jehnova, though for all the splendour, he had not yet achieved the music crit attention or cultural cache to match his talent. Ultimately, he won’t feel how heavy the Irish rap crown is without this breakthrough. But such conversations are secondary right now. Most important is that Jehnova is getting even better, becoming more prolific, consistently making astral projection possible to those who know.