Project Review: Marnz Malone Wraps Up Trilogy In Style On ‘Yaqeen’

Marnz Malone has been one of the most anticipated voices coming out of Newtown, Birmingham, and is often mentioned alongside the esteemed likes of MIST, Millionz and Stardom. After going viral for his jail freestyle videos that earned co-signs from Central Cee, Nines and Stormzy, his fifth full-length release, YAQEEN, is the final chapter of his mixtape trilogy. YAQEEN in Arabic means the certainty or belief acquired through experience, and this project is the swan song that excavates dealings in life, love and death by placing faith at the heart. 

To understand Marnz and his character is to see how he has laid bare the interiors and exteriors of his life and those of his close friends and family through visceral and engaging storytelling. He reveals a world in charcoal that is aggressive, lost and left behind. With a different producer on almost every track, the project adopts an assembly-line approach, yet a cohesive language streams throughout and paves way for a consistently conscious narration. His storytelling now orbits a more lucid state of clarity. 

The album’s lead single, “Nana’s Veranda”, prophetically proclaims, “no matter what the story reads / the binding has been done”. If the mission is to explore certainty, Marnz journeys through a nihilistic storm, “jail had me question whether all this was really for me”, flitting back and forth between past and present in search of a sense of purpose: “I made my days count / instead of counting days till release”. Airy and metallic vocals float as apparitions above penned bars whilst Marnz innocently reflects on his earliest memories created in Jamaica. The full-circle return, reuniting with family and remembering his father’s death at his grave taps into what it means to return home, prompting a meditative listen to the remaining fourteen tracks. 

“Splashin’” ft J Hus has tons of replay value and my only regret was not listening to this on Skullcandy headphones, because the bass is hungry. Both artists have great chemistry that showcase how Marnz can match Hus’ skill for versatility in meeting the needs of both the club and the streets. “Chy Cartier’s Ad Libs” samples Miles Canton’s,“I Lied To You”, from Sinners. Drill and blues is an unexpected combination but it pairs well and signals Marnz’s experimentation beyond his signature sound. Whilst this signature has been consistent, critics have pointed out that at times it has almost become predictable.

The Giveon-like vocals and delicate piano keys in “Volume in the Silence” and “Penthouse Suite” amplify that loneliness. Often Marnz will end the track with an echoing, spoken word dialogue as the beat drops to a total, uncanny silence. On “Misery Loves Company”, he says “every night I talk to God / but he don’t chat to me back”. 

I imagine making music in total isolation and silence forces you to sharpen the spear of lyricism. Marnz boasts elastic and homophonous rhyme schemes, spelling-bee bars and a syllabic intuition so strong that he can surely be crowned as the prince of punchlines. “Sold a Xabad to the Mali’s / they said that the mag had issues”, is an intelligent double-entendre. Often showering witty quotables with an instinctual ease, “whoever told you you can’t fight fire with fire  / didn’t have a stick“, his bars occasionally run the risk of being overlooked and not registered properly. Yet, what I enjoy most about Marnz’s work is the element of continuity by recycling darts from previous songs and extending metaphors across time. In “I dream whilst I’m awake”, he says, “I slept in a cell / but never slept on myself”, a bar featured on “Free Dior” from a previous mixtape, that echoes once more again in the project. 

Love and loss go hand in hand. Malone realises that he’s a particular exception in ‘the game’ as he’s the first to be signed to a label in prison and is ready to acclimatise to a radically different lifestyle on the outside. However, despite being offered a second-chance, the losses and mistakes of his previous life converge and overlap with the present situation, complicating the idea of starting on a clean slate. “Letter to Heaven”, although feels more spiritually aligned with Tina’s Boy, is a tender reaffirmation of Malone’s purpose to honour those he’s lost and ensure their legacies endure. N.A.S, mentioned multiple times in the work, is a charity set up by Malone for his close friend who passed, nurturing ambition and success, and in doing so showing how material continuity can’t erase the meaning of a life and survives death. 

Catch, who Flashy Sillah says to be one of the most important voices in UK rap at the moment, features on a heart-breaking ballad, “Love is not a Song”. In line with the project’s red string theory, her reflections on nightmares and dreams in prison parallel Marnz’s writing. The immediacy of the guitar inspires an emotional tenderness that pairs exquisitely with her careworn voice. “I don’t love you to the moon and back / it’s from hell to heaven to Saturn”. Their verses are equal in measure, symbolic of two roads converging in an unflinching yet candid attempt to define love. Certainty is gained through having endured extremes.   

Whilst YAQEEN extends prolonged moments of magic, it doesn’t just close the trilogy. It feels as though the proverbial fruit of his unrelenting time inside is now in our hands. Marnz was grounded firmly in the realities of his past, but the general catharsis is one of surrendering to the future with faith now centred. In abandoning physical protection for spiritual protection and taking accountability for his flaws, Marnz’s self-compassion makes his progress over the recent years extremely encouraging, raising the question of how his next project may continue this journey of reinvention post-freedom. Either way, he is a faith road rapper with the potential to blow his reach even further this year. 

Star Rating: 4/5

Words by Sakithya Sothinathan