They smoke an absurd amount of weed, rap about everything from ketamine to pharmaceutical trials, and bounce from reggae to soul to drum and bass without warning. Somehow, “Asylum” is also warm, funny and the best album I’ve heard all year.
I’ve listened to Asylum sober. I’ve listened to it couch-locked. I’ve listened to it in the car, on a run, alone, with friends, with my partner. It has not missed once. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to want from a record.
So let me get the verdict out of the way before I explain myself. Ren and Chris Webby have made the best album I’ve heard all year, and one of the best collaborations I’ve heard in a long time. Two of the sharpest lyricists working, from two countries and two scenes that were not supposed to overlap, holed up in a house in the Connecticut woods and came out with fifteen songs that did not exist when they walked in.
I should say up front that I was already a fan of both, separately, and that I’ve been interviewing Webby since 2018. Ren, I found by accident. I was in a hotel room in Chicago with a friend, going down a rap rabbit hole, watching a Juice WRLD freestyle, and YouTube served me “Hi Ren” next. I have not stopped talking about it since. I made everybody I know watch it.
So when I heard these two had made a record together, I was going to like it. What I was not prepared for was this.
The origin is almost stupid. Ren left a comment on one of Webby’s videos. Webby’s girlfriend spotted it, told him she was a fan and that he should do something with him, and Webby said he didn’t know who that was. They started messaging. Ren flew over to shoot a video, stayed at the house, somebody picked up a guitar, and by the time anyone looked up they had written three songs.
Then they went back and did it again, and the whole thing was done. Both of them say the same thing in the documentary and neither seems to fully believe it: you usually hit a wall. They never hit the wall.
The record will not sit still
The first thing that surprised me is how little of this sounds like a rap album, and the documentary explains why. Before they trade bars, they trade influences: Sublime, Bob Marley, sixties and early seventies classic rock, The Clash, The Police. Later, producer JP On Da Track brings up Soviet-era music and uses it as a reference point for the bassline that became “Neurodivergent.” They set up a live drum kit. There is a kazoo. It is played with total sincerity.
The reggae is what got me. Both Ren and Webby have worked in that lane before, but not across this much of a record. On Asylum, it keeps resurfacing: in the grooves, the offbeat, the phrasing, the way whole songs lean into it instead of just borrowing the texture. “Tarantula” sits in a groove traditional enough to remind me of Latin American reggae bands (Riddim, Kameleba) more than anything in either man’s catalog, and then detonates into jungle and drum and bass in its last minute, a pivot Webby laughs off as British instinct after everyone in the room thought the song was finished. “Smoking Gun” goes ska. “Silence” leans the same way. For a project this heavy on lyricism, a startling amount of it moves on the offbeat.
“Madhouse” opens on piano and a howl that sounds lifted from a twenties cartoon, all soul-shout and blues wail, and it builds the world in about forty seconds. “Instigator” is the second best thing here: a loose, playful skank that lands close enough to Manu Chao’s “King of the Bongo” that I can’t unhear it, carrying some of the most violent writing on the album. The documentary catches them finding it, counting syllables out loud until Webby stops and says, “That’s the one.” The video spells INPATIENT across a table in what certainly look like joints.
‘Down the Road’ is the best song here and it isn’t close
Built on the crossroads myth, with Ren as the man who signs and Webby as the fallen morning star doing the selling, it moves like soul rather than hip-hop. There’s Bill Withers in it, the ache of “Grandma’s Hands,” especially the way Meg Mac sings it. There’s Bishop Briggs in how the vocal strains past comfort. There’s the resignation of “Wild Horses.” The video is hand-drawn, nearly monochrome, closer to a storybook than to any rap video I can think of.
Webby calls it his favorite song on the project. It’s mine too, and the documentary shows why it works: the idea didn’t come from either of them. A friend visiting the house heard the beat and suggested the devil at the crossroads, pointing out that Lucifer was the morning star, the god of music, the favorite before he got cast out. Webby threw everything he had written in the trash and started over. Ren pushes his voice to the breaking point on the bridge and you can hear the room react to it in real time.
Now the drugs
You cannot talk about this album without talking about how much weed went into it, and the person to talk about is JP On Da Track, who produced almost all of it. JP spends a remarkable amount of that documentary taking bong rips. He takes one, sits down, makes a beat that reorganizes the entire session, and takes another one. Webby says he has never seen anyone rip that many in one sitting and still function. Ren asks him, on camera and genuinely curious, whether the bong is actually helping. JP says he doesn’t know, he’s just about to take another. The album closes with a ceremonial last bong and Webby signs off the documentary by announcing he’s going to have one more.
The house in the woods is not an accident either. It’s how Webby works. He told me back in 2020 that he’d rented a cabin near Woodstock and moved his whole team up there, and that the retreats they did in the woods that year produced entire songs, one of them written on mushrooms. Six years later he takes a British rapper he met through a comment section into the Connecticut trees for two weeks and comes out with an album. The man has a method and it involves leaving town.
But call this a weed album and you’d miss most of it, and Webby would be the first to say so. “I don’t consider myself to be a weed rapper,” he told me in 2020. “I feel like I’m so much more than a weed rapper: I stand for stuff.” The lyrics on Asylum run two separate drug vocabularies, and the record lives in the gap between them.
The first is recreational chaos played entirely for laughs. “Mason Jar” is the peak and it is very funny: a running inventory of ketamine, weed, mushroom chocolate, cocaine, acid, ecstasy, tusi, whiskey and cigarettes, delivered with the flat affect of somebody reading a receipt, while the hook explains that the producer got so high he forgot how to make beats and started drumming on a jar: “We’re so high that JP forgot how to make beats / Now he’s drummin’ on a mason jar.”
That is not a flex. It’s a bit, and the punchline is Ren announcing he needs to lie down. “Smoking Gun” runs the same engine through a plot involving a police raid, a stash of mushrooms eaten in a panic to avoid getting caught with it, and melting walls. “Silence” is worse, and I mean that as praise. It walks two men through a night in Brighton. The first has put away fifteen Stellas, a Jagerbomb and a vodka chaser before he even gets thrown out of the bar, at which point he goes to see his dealer and orders what amounts to a menu: coke, weed, ecstasy, ketamine, nitrous, amphetamine, mescaline and a Viagra. The second is a visiting American who left his drink unattended and got dosed without knowing it. That part is the one moment on this record where nobody is joking.
The second vocabulary is pharmaceutical, and it is angry. “Madhouse” turns prescriptions into a game of guessing which side effects you’ll draw. “Neurodivergent” deliberately refuses to separate medicine from recreation, stacking prescriptions and stimulants and edibles under one word while Webby describes being medicated into a zombie. Then he lands on what may be the cleanest statement of the album’s entire conceit: “This world’s an asylum and, shit, we all in the system / And our sanity’s the motherfuckin’ cost of admission.” “End of the World” catalogues collapse and then tells you to medicate and enjoy it. And the title track delivers the coldest line on the album: “The doctor is your local dealer,” filed alongside the sinning preacher and the banker writing his own check.
None of that is entirely conceptual, either. While they were making this in Connecticut, Ren was still in treatment, leaving the studio for IVIG infusions and getting weekly penicillin injections. On “Tarantula,” the cannula in his arm ends up directly in the rhyme: “A cannula from my wrist, sick material.” There’s a moment where Webby asks him what a cannula even is and he answers without breaking stride, because it’s the tube he lives with.
The Gila monster joke
“Dr. Meyers” takes the pharmaceutical side of the album to its darkest conclusion.
It’s a three-act story about a pediatric drug trial. Ren plays a sick boy named Jeremiah writing in a diary, thrilled that his doctor says he’s responding beautifully and that he’ll be out in three weeks. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Webby plays the doctor, in dated clinical notes: the treatments aren’t working, they’re making the boy worse, and they did the same to the last twelve children, whom he catches himself calling test subjects. He talks himself through it. Distance is scientific. The parents signed consent forms. The pharma reps write the checks. The boy dies.
Then the third act. The doctor finally gets his breakthrough, goes to tell the company, and gets his funding pulled. They’ve moved on to a weight-loss product. In the song, the punchline is that it comes from Gila monster venom.
That isn’t entirely a surreal flourish, which is what makes it land. Exenatide, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist approved by the FDA, was developed from exendin-4, a peptide first identified in Gila monster salivary secretions. The joke is that thirteen dead kids were less commercially interesting than a weight-loss drug. And the joke runs across the record, because Ozempic gets name-checked two tracks earlier in the middle of a drunken street fight.
The executive can’t even remember the doctor’s name. He calls him Michaels. Twice.
It should be miserable. It isn’t.
Here’s the part I did not expect. On paper, two writers this dark should have produced something suffocating. Ren in particular can be bleak, political and unrelenting. Instead, Asylum is bright. Not naive, not soft, but genuinely fun to sit inside.
“Caskets” is a song about dying that plays as gratitude instead of dread, and it should not work as well as it does after an hour of ketamine bits and dead test subjects. “Lunatic Lullaby” closes the record with Ren narrating his own birth as a cosmic betrayal and finding music in the beat of his mother’s heart monitor, which is the most Ren thing on an album with real competition for that title.
“Me and My Monster” deserves its own line. It never names a substance, and that ambiguity is most of why it works: the monster could be addiction, mental illness, or just the part of yourself you spend a lifetime trying to outrun. Something that showed up in childhood, that has to be fed, that can’t be evicted, that the narrator eventually stops fighting and agrees to live with. Put it next to Webby admitting on “Bad Company” that he’s “got some substances I love as much as my family members,” and one of those readings gets considerably harder to ignore.
And “Bad Company” got its title because Webby and Kai Lacey spent an afternoon reading the list of things people used to get committed to asylums for. Bad company was on it.
Which reframes the whole thing. The asylum isn’t a metaphor for being crazy. It’s a metaphor for what a society decides to lock you up for.
You can hear the friendship
This is the part that actually explains the record, and it isn’t the drugs or the concept or the range.
Most rap collaborations are assembled. Verses get emailed, features get cleared, a manager approves a mix. You can hear it, and at some point you stop noticing because everything sounds like that. Asylum doesn’t sound like that for one second. It sounds like two people who met by accident, found out they had far more musical language in common than either expected, smoked an enormous amount of weed in a house in the woods, and could not figure out when to stop writing songs.
There’s also a thread here that goes back further than this record. Webby told me in 2020 that ADHD can be debilitating but that it comes with its own superpower, the ability to hyperfocus on something he’s genuinely interested in. In the Asylum documentary, that’s exactly the word the room keeps using for those weeks: hyperfocus, time not existing, everything getting done. There is also a song on this album called “Neurodivergent.” Six years apart, the same man describing the same engine.
The documentary makes the rest of it obvious. They talk over each other about Sublime and Marley before they talk about bars. Webby pulls Ren up on a lazy line and Ren says it made him work harder. Ren says Webby’s obsessiveness is the reason the record got finished properly, and says it twice, and says he doesn’t say it lightly. Somebody holds a funeral for two koi fish that died of a parasite. Then, there’s Webby’s kazoo debut. Both of them keep circling the same sentence in slightly different words: they had never had chemistry like this.
Ren also knows the pairing confused people, largely because of the perceived political distance between them, and he says that was part of the point. That turning disagreement into enmity is exactly how a world becomes a madhouse. He doesn’t name the differences. I’d like to ask him about that.
Two guys a lot of people assumed had little reason to get along made a record about a building full of people society decided didn’t belong. It’s very high, it’s very sad, it’s funnier than it has any right to be, and it has worked in every single room I’ve played it in.
Go listen to it. Then watch the documentary. Then listen to it again.
