In Dimes We Trust

Mike Dimes is a hip-hop nomad in multiple senses. Part of a military family, he moved across the southeastern and western United States as a child before settling in his birth state of Texas. Dimes originally dreamed of pursuing a career in basketball, but a latent interest in poetry and an influx of rap influences—everyone from 50 Cent and Tupac to A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$—pushed him toward music. His 2021 debut DLOG, released while in college for business management, put him in the same field as artists like Kenny Mason and Grip: lyrically minded spitters comfortable over just about any kind of beat. DLOG’s sample platter of sounds could be hit-or-miss, but Dimes’ steely confidence and flow switch-ups kept the songs on track.

His latest project In Dimes We Trust is more musically focused, foregrounding the bludgeoning low end and minor-key flourishes of Texas and Tennessee hip-hop. He has an ear for the kind of sounds designed to drive both live crowds and headphone fetishists into fits of nirvana, and his best songs revolve around menacing, three-dimensional beats. The gloomy stomp of producer Zuri’s beat for “Paparazzi” evokes vintage Three 6 Mafia and Key Glock in equal measure, while singles “Home” and “No Trends”—produced by Zuri and cvleb and Treetime and Rxkz, respectively—pit victorious samples against weapons-grade 808s. But Dimes is never overwhelmed, his monotone voice cutting through the clatter at every opportunity. Considering that he’s only 21 and still in college, his presence and technique are remarkably sharp—he blends in with the beat without becoming constrained by it, keeping a breakneck pace on “Religion” and finding pockets you might not expect on “Same Gang.”

There’s a handful of lyrical subjects Dimes is keen on: being a better rapper than you; getting more women than you; generally stunting across this plane of existence in ways you could never imagine. But for all his skill and composure, his imagination is pretty limited in scope. His metaphors and punchlines aren’t quite as clever as this level of posturing demands—“I’m a Christian rocking Christian Dior” from “Luv” is one of several that feel basic—and even the sex boasts occasionally blur together. If it weren’t for the beats, some of the bars on “Jiggalo” and “Backroom” would be interchangeable. It’s a problem fellow subgenre-straddling rappers like IDK frequently encounter: No outright granola bars stand out, and that’s almost worse than if they did.

What is memorable—what balances out the patches of indistinct writing—are Dimes’ delivery and flows. He has a way of finding the melody in the amelodic, of stretching words until they snap like glow sticks. Take the way he chops up the names of all the women he’s seeing halfway through the second verse of “Jiggalo” (“Stephanie, Bethany, I don’t know, something with Effanie”); or the way his hook on “No Trends” careens around the drums and sirens of the beat like an inner tube through a waterslide. The excitement stems from the feel and application of Dimes’ words as much as from their meaning, verses and hooks feeding off the electricity of his vocal arrangements.

That isn’t to say that Dimes’ words carry no weight. He’s much more interesting as a storyteller than as a punchline rapper. Little bits of autobiography—telling off a naysaying teacher at the beginning of “Paparazzi”; the truncated path to success he lays out near the end of closing track “Who Is Mike Dimes?” (“Fourteen, saw a dream, 15, made a scheme/Sixteen, made a team, 21, love the green”)—illuminate his come-up and flesh out his personality. In Dimes We Trust inches audiences closer to a full understanding of his purpose. No songs here approach the bare-all storytelling of DLOG standout “Drive By” or his TikTok smash “My Story,” but his mood and control are fierce and he moves through beats like oil through water. Even when Mike Dimes’ writing blends in with the zeitgeist, his performance will grab your ears and shake your brain for loose change.