Let us dispense with the tidy genre boxes immediately, because Zmack certainly has. Memphis trap collides with doom-sludge guitar, horrorcore menace rubs shoulders with New Wave synth glint, and somewhere underneath it all a funk-metal bassline lurches like it's escaped from a Faith No More session gone feral. This is the sound of a man who grew up worshipping Chuck Mosley's ragged howl and Powerman 5000's electro-stomp in equal measure, then decided the only honest way to honour both was to smash them together in his bedroom studio rather than politely alternate between them on separate tracks.

"Rust Sound" opens proceedings as a kind of civic anthem for the forgotten — not sentimental, not nostalgic for a Rust Belt that used to gleam, but clear-eyed about the beauty lurking in corrosion. Zmack treats decay as a texture rather than a tragedy, distorting his slap-bass until it barely resembles a bass at all, more a rusted hinge groaning open. It's a bold choice for an opener, refusing to court the listener with anything resembling a hook, insisting instead that you acclimatise to his weather before he lets the sun in.

"Blood of the Irish" is where the record's emotional ballast sits. Zmack's Irish-American identity gets aired without a hint of shamrock kitsch — this is pride delivered with clenched fists rather than a pint glass, history worn as armour rather than costume. The aggression here feels earned, not performed, which separates it from a hundred lesser rappers reaching for heritage as a marketing hook.

Then "Dirty Muskrat" arrives to remind you that Zmack has a sense of humour buried somewhere beneath the grime, even if it's the pitch-black variety. Industrial power-tool textures buzz and grind against dubstep low-end like a garage band trying to remix a construction site, and the song structure abandons hip-hop's usual architecture entirely in favour of something closer to metal's verse-chorus violence. It shouldn't work. It does.

What elevates this collection above mere genre tourism is the grief threaded quietly through it. Zmack's late collaborator CJ haunts these sessions — not as a mawkish dedication tacked onto liner notes, but as the invisible producer whose fingerprints remain on every beat built from scratch in a home studio rather than a professional facility. The album's raw, unpolished edges aren't a budgetary compromise; they're a philosophy, a refusal to sand away the roughness that gives Rustbelt life its character.

Is it a cohesive listen in the traditional sense? Not remotely, and thank goodness for that. Cohesion is for artists still auditioning for somebody else's approval. Zmack has clearly stopped auditioning. *Rustbelt Rejects* sounds like exactly what its maker intended: a scrapyard of influences welded into something defiantly, chaotically his own, and considerably more compelling for its refusal to be anything else.