When JUNE! steps inside a booth to record, always it’s with an openness to pain, giving even their darkest reflections a strange warmth, as though survival itself could still be romantic. tasteful grit, their latest project, feels only slightly different. In it, the Cleveland-born, Charlotte-based rapper is less interested in unpacking suffering than in sitting inside its climate cross-legged with a cigar and a cocksure sneer. An atmosphere that frames grit not as chest-beating hubristic pomp—not always—but in a more guarded, hands-in-pocket way.
Even the title hints at this contradiction. Grit implies abrasion, struggle, roughness. But tasteful tweaks the dynamic; makes it sound curated and stylized. On the EP, JUNE! raps about endurance and all its metonyms, but interestingly, they rarely sound fully consumed by those emotions. They’re keeping them at arm’s length—a different, likely mature, progression from What a Life 2—dissociated or perhaps unburdened, smoothing pain into mood and aesthetics, the album runs off.
The opening title track immediately introduces the project’s emotional palette: faint melancholy and a subdued sense of optimism. “If this is home, where is the love?” a weightless female voice unspools over easy piano chords and a sedative background, drifting through the mix like smoke. The song carries the language of hustle: working hard and surviving long enough to see success. “Real life pain leads to real life gain,” they rap in an unflinching tone, while also describing their mother worrying over the bottles stacked around them. JUNE! sounds like somebody trying to maintain composure while quietly wrestling with the emotional cost of that perseverance. Dishonest or alluring? The swings to decide, but that sense of restraint becomes one of the EP’s defining qualities. The rapper rarely erupts emotionally, even when the themes suggest they should; even when previous projects had primed us for that kind of catharsis. Their delivery instead radiates a detached quality, making everything else—features, production shifts—feel more designed, conscious.
Fortunately, the production does much of the heavy lifting emotionally, through swirling piano loops and spacy synth work, giving the project a psychological weight even when JUNE! themselves remains elusive.
Throughout tasteful grit, the slow-burning beats are remarkably spacious without ever feeling empty. “chicken ova rice” revolves around a dark, lowkey electronic loop leaving room for every line to breathe, while “the light,” a standout track for how vividly it cuts through the project’s lingering languor, bursts open with warm horns and a buoyant jazz swing that instantly changes the project’s energy. The EP’s best production choices understand that the mood does not have to come at the expense of movement, and even when the drums are mellow, shifting instrumental patterns and melodic flourishes keep the songs in motion. That liveliness is especially apparent whenever collaborators enter the picture.
The features on tasteful grit introduce such beautiful taste (pun intended), unpredictability, and personality into an otherwise inward-facing project. Chicago’s experimental talent Willyynova’s appearance on “chicken ova rice” injects the song with fiery charisma, their playful cadence and animated wordplay cutting through the haze surrounding JUNE!’s more restrained delivery. Lines like, “Picked the hottest spice / Hotter than syphilis piss on a Friday night,” delivered with an elastic cheek, make the verse kinetic and slightly chaotic, energizing the entire track.
Meanwhile, Atlanta’s multifaceted Seline Haze’s contribution to “the light” serves a different but equally important purpose. Her coasting poise and swing-jazz cadence bring a genuine sense of optimism to the EP. “Hold on tight to what you love / Darkness never dimmed the light,” she sings-raps during the song’s opening moments, before a sample of Diana Ross’ 1975 interview on positive thinking slides seamlessly into the track, reinforcing the song’s shift toward a more buoyant feel. After the moody spell of the opening songs, “the light” becomes a moment where tasteful grit exhales, truly coming alive.
There is this subtle gulf between the songs where JUNE! is bouncing off other artists and the moments where they stand entirely alone. The tracks in dialogue feel warmer, more emotionally dynamic. When isolated, their energy often buckles in on itself, drifting deeper into the EP’s tempered sonics, which is not necessarily a weakness—in many ways, it is part of what gives tasteful grit its identity—but it does reveal where the project is strongest. Here, the rapper works best when their restraint is contrasted against more expressive personalities; collaborators like Willynova and Seline Haze, who puncture the cool bearing just enough to keep it from becoming emotionally static.
Lyrically, the EP is less focused on intricate storytelling than on maintaining emotional tone. Through flashes of strong writing scattered throughout, like on “caress”: “We used to accept crumbs, but now we break bread / I pray my niggas stay fed.” Their greatest strength remains tonal consistency, and rather than dissecting their struggles in explicit detail, they surf the shoreline of implication, which helps sustain the EP’s self-possessed disposition.
The darker moments, too, maintain a sleekness to them. On the closing track “whoa!,” JUNE! deepens their voice into something harsher and more menacing, while pensive chords and faint drum thumps create an atmosphere of looming tension. “We gon’ stick around, fuck what you heard,” they rap with calm menace. By the end of the EP, the “grit” promised in the title has again shifted from the triumphant feels of “the light” and becomes something of unshowy drive and endurance.
That emotional restraint may keep tasteful grit from hitting with the devastating intimacy of rap projects that fully bare themselves to the listener, but it also gives the EP its unique character. JUNE! may not reveal everything on their latest project, but that distance becomes part of the project’s aura, creating a listening experience that turns reading into a kind of puzzle, where everything from lyrical expression to production texture has to be assembled by the listener into a coherent emotional picture. “Can’t wrap your head around this, best not to untie the rope,” they boast on “what we can.” Well, that pretty much sums it up.
