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One of Maryland’s most slept on gems has been back making some game-changing noise, finding his own lane in constantly changing flows and an incomparable, one-of-a-kind voice. The man that goes by Jah Darko has been shaping a bright future in what’s been a successful 2020 thus far. Releasing three singles already this year, he’s sitting at over 20K monthly listeners on Spotify alone and shows no sign of slowing down. Not to mention, each track has received more notoriety than the last, and although we’ve seen plenty of progression out of Darko overtime, this year looks particularly promising for the DMV native.
His second release, that came out just this April, entitled Regardless has him rapping about his “phone on silent” while he’s on the move because he knows if “she call [he’s] gonna be right there.” Making it sound like, and personifying a lifestyle, where Jah feels as if this girl materializes and objectifies him because of his success, especially when he goes on to sing “all the money in the world don’t solve no problems,” so he asks “why have that if he can’t have you?”
Jumping back in time to 2019, one of Darko’s cleanest and most slept on tracks that helped him build an early cult following fanbase was Never Knew featuring 1kprince, one of Maryland’s other finest blue chip up and comers. Jah raps about how he “Never knew her name, [but] knew that she know us,” flexing his catchy and melodic delivery while rapping when they “hit the scene you know the weed go up,” and that he still “bag shorty even if she was cuffed.” 1kPrince hops on to add some clean vocals of his own singing how “the girls on [him but he] hasn’t even blown up.” The two complemented each other nicely on this track, showing off their raw talent and through the roof potential, which was an early “coming out party” of sorts especially for Darko on what was to come as the quality of his music only continued to grow.
Jah’s latest track here in 2020 though, entitled Hurdles, shows just how far Darko’s artistic ability has come in just over a year as he melodically goes into how “she gon’ jump through guys like hurdles,” asking you to “watch how his life gon’ change,” while he prophecizes that he's on the brink of a major takeoff. Jah says “last year she was curving,” but now that she wants him he seems to have lost interest. Sounds about right, if you ask us!
One of our favorite tracks in the Maryland product’s complete discography though has to be Talk, which was released back in 2018, but has to be one of the hardest trap rap songs we’ve heard highlighted by Jah calling out all kinds of people in the industry and in his personal life. Saying you “paint your nails black acting, you got fake depression,” while also flexing his talent in asking the rappers and women in his DMs if they’d “stop sending links cuz that’d just be a blessing.” A raw, emotional, and brutally honest reflection of his own life in the industry to date the song takes no prisoners and has all the aspects of a classic ‘turn up the volume’ type of banger.
As Jah continues his rapid rise to the top, make sure to give him a follow on all social media platforms @jahdarko and us here at @engmtcent for more content on the latest and greatest in the underground scene.