Dahi Lets the Distortion Win on “Square Up,” His Woozy Fousheé Team-Up

The producer’s Black Boy (Alternative) closes in on August 28 with a grittier, guitar-scarred detour built around Fousheé’s cracked voice.

Dahi dropped “Square Up” on August 3, the tenth cut off his forthcoming debut album Black Boy (Alternative), and it arrived without much fanfare next to the record’s starrier collide. That undersells it. Where the album’s Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino features carry the weight of expectation, “Square Up” is looser and stranger, a slow-burning, woozy electro-rock cut that hands nearly all of its texture to Fousheé. Her vocal sends with distortion and grit across the track, less a topline than an instrument being pushed toward its breaking point.

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Dahi has spent over a decade shaping other people’s records from behind the boards, credited on Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees,” Drake’s “Worst Behavior,” and Big Sean’s “I Don’t F*ck With You,” plus a Grammy win for co-producing 21 Savage’s “A Lot.” “Square Up” reads like a producer testing what happens when he stops handing songs off and starts living inside them. The guitar tone is corroded rather than clean, the drums sit back in the mix, and Fousheé’s voice is treated less like a lead vocal and more like another warped signal fighting for space. It is a rougher cousin to the alt-rock detours she has taken on her own records, including her 2022 album Softcore, which blended alternative rock and hyperpop textures under RCA and Trackmasters.

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“Square Up” lands as the second-to-last song on an 11-track sequence that Dahi has described as years in the making, a project reframe of Black identity as self-defined rather than sorted into hip-hop, R&B, or rock lanes. The guest list around it is stacked enough to make a single track easy to miss: Kendrick Lamar and Amber Mark on “How To Pray,” Childish Gambino on “Running,” Vince Staples and Channel Tres on the opener “Who Are You,” Moses Sumney and Mez on “Find Me,” and Elmiene and Ravyn Lenae closing things out on “Drowning.” Dahi previewed the record live at a listening event at Sister Dreamer Park in Los Angeles in early August, bringing out Gambino, Staples, and Lenae for a set that doubled as a first public airing for several of the songs. Black Boy (Alternative) is due August 28 via ALTER Music.

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The pairing makes sense on paper before it even plays. Fousheé built her name on vocal elasticity, from the “Deep End” hook that Sleepy Hallow sampled into a breakout hit, through the guitar-forward alt-pop of her Time Machine EP, to the harder-edged Softcore. Dahi, meanwhile, has quietly worked alternative and rock textures into hip-hop and R&B records for most of his career without stepping forward as their author. “Square Up” puts both instincts in the same room and lets the friction between them carry the song, rather than smoothing it into something more radio-shaped.