SaxKixAve Go for More on "Terrell Charbonneau"

The New Orleans hip-hop duo upgrade everything for their most satisfying release yet.

Hip-hop tends to live in one of two places—the cutting edge or some moment in the past that signifies authenticity. It aggressively embraces the right now or it clings instead to a yesteryear point held up as somehow realer.

New Orleans’ SaxKixAve manages to avoid this reactionary dichotomy, neither caught up in current rock star posturing nor tied to any era or artists in the past either. You can hear an awareness of hip-hop history in Alfred Banks’ flow and Albert Allenback’s beats, but the acts that came before them show up as influences, not as ephemeral talismen that authenticate their connection to rap’s version of the good, the true and the beautiful.

Exhibit A is their new album, Terrell Charbonneau. They’ve put out two strong EPs so far, but Terrell Charbonneau is their first full length album, and it’s the project they’ve been building to. Their 2023 EP Nectarine Peels presented them as a hip-hop act unafraid to be playful, and that part of their musical personality remains. On Terrell Charbonneau, they build on that with tracks that add logical dimensions. The results sound like a natural product of their partnership. You feel like you know who Banks and Allenback are after listening to the album, not because it reveals biographical details but because it sounds like a clear expression of who they are.

The album starts on a familiar note with “Love Muffin,” picking up on the food motif that gave Nectarine Peels its connective tissue. “Your love is hot from the oven,” Allenback sings over a halting R&B groove before Banks breaks down the song’s central thought.

As a kid bumped the radio with my mom.

She played oldies than I hear a love song.

that had this weird direct metaphor about true feelings

Love is like a muffin or whatever, I was hearing.

Like many of SaxKixAve songs, there’s a lot going on in “Love Muffin.” Banks talks about love songs to talk about love, bouncing between social observations and his personal confusion. Those moves are pretty smart, but he earns additional style points for continuing to weave food items and particularly baked goods through his rhymes, adding an additional cohesive layer.

The beat that Allenback constructed for it sounds like it could be a sample of a Philly International single, the kind of thing Kanye might have built on in his earlier days, and throughout the beats are subtly processed to sound like samples. That makes Terrell Charbonneau feel like the most hip-hop of SaxKixAve’s releases, even though the album is also their most musically expansive. “Arctic” starts with Branks rapping melodically over a simple piano figure, but when the programmed drums kick in, horns and Allenback’s flute join the piano to create something that could be a Donald Byrd sample. That energizes the song and ramps it up until the hook, when the drums drop out. After the quiet moment, all the instruments return, joined by backing vocals and stabbing keyboard strings. The changing dynamics and the song’s swelling scope reinforce the swinging groove that Banks rides with dexterity and intensity.

Banks’ lines and delivery sound like common sense, but they’re not afraid to be silly in intelligent ways. “Bee Pollen” has such an aggressive, Vegas pit band, swinging groove pushed by blaring horns that you almost miss a voice in the hook singing in a faux operatic voice, “Buzz buzz / buzz buzz / I am a bee.” On other occasions, they put their sense of humor up front. The title “Done with the” leaves you wondering what they’re done with for all of three or four seconds before you learn it’s “bullshit” once the song starts. “White People (in Mostly Black Spaces)” lets the white Allenback sing about “White people in mostly black spaces / seeing other white people and asking / are you a good one like me?” It’s almost a skit—a hip-hop convention SaxKixAve wholeheartedly embraces—and with that in mind, the track has the most stripped down beat, which lets the words go from easy joke to one that also has some real barbs.

They also keep it tight so that it doesn’t wear out the joke. In general, SaxKixAve has had a remarkably good sense of how long their songs should be. Songs never feel truncated or like musical or lyrical ideas were left unexplored, but they don’t hang around without a clear purpose. The one exception is clearly a deliberate one, “Teeny Tiny Freestyle.” The album closer goes on for eight minutes, and as the title suggests, it’s clearly a freestyle there to show Banks’ significant freestyling skills. He shows them off in live shows, where his spontaneity and the daredevil nature of the stunt—Can he do it? For how long? Can he make it worth hearing?—gives the moment juice. On record, you have to take the artist’s word for it that a track is truly freestyled, and while I believe Banks, I don’t need eight minutes of evidence. It certainly proves his skills, but at the end of the album, it’s feels like the afterparty more than the final statement. The good sense shown throughout Terrell Charbonneau makes me think they know that, and that it’s placed at the end of the album so that people can dip out when ready without messing with the flow of the record.

Part of the fun of Terrell Charbonneau is that it shows Banks and Allenback’s growth as a duo. The collaboration has brought out something new in both of them since the beginning, but each project adds dimensions. You can’t help but feel like you’re hearing people explore the music they make together with confidence and honesty, and that has led to better song craft, richer beats, and more expressive bars. Banks is clearly feeling himself as an artist right now and rightly so, and Allenback has created a musical landscape that is expansive, musically satisfying and true to hip-hop. At every level, Terrell Charbonneau sounds like the product of an act that has found itself.