At the close of a difficult year, a room can become a ledger. In Norcross, Don Rello used such a room to make ‘I Don’t Watch TV III’, an explicit Hip-Hop/Rap album released through RAPREC.
The seven-track release lasts 24 minutes and 41 seconds, a compact frame for an artist who calls it his sharpest and cleanest work while admitting that its feeling runs deep.
This album review begins with a home studio asked to contain loss and the arrival of a daughter.
‘I Don’t Watch TV III’ is the third instalment of a series that has followed Don Rello across several years. Apple Music lists ‘I Don’t Watch TV II’ in 2018, alongside Only Time Will Tell (2019), Mudweiser (2021), and The Spiraling Conundrum (2022).
The new record reads as a chapter in an ongoing self-portrait. Its title suggests an artist choosing attention over distraction.
Rello became a father, lost a close friend, stayed close to someone he loved who faced persistent struggle, and took a needed trip.
Such events cannot be reduced to a checklist, yet their proximity supplies the album’s emotional premise. This is independent Hip-Hop/Rap informed by private reckoning rather than public spectacle.
Rello offers a slower proposition, patience, revision, and the discipline of sitting with experience until it speaks plainly.
That patience appears in the making. Rello reports roughly a year of testing, mixing and fine-tuning at his home studio, guided by the belief that every part of an album deserves equal care.
Without direct session credits or a bar-by-bar listening record, it would be careless to assign instruments or vocal choices that have not been documented.
The stated method describes a producer-minded approach in which cohesion is planned, not added at the last minute. His label, found through mutual friends, receives credit for helping shape the artistic direction.
The available track titles point toward the questions occupying this phase of Rello’s writing: Drowning Even More, Talking Heads, Is It Worth It?, Went Running To Find, Devil In The Same Dress, Windhitdatreez, Is It Worth It? and Went Running To Find, include Donski, with the spoken words by Donski on the latter.
Their presence gives the record a second human presence at points where the project otherwise remains rooted in personal processing.
A fitting artistic parallel comes from the Dutch vanitas still life, where fruit, flowers, a glass and a reminder of mortality sit in the same small frame.
Rello’s documented year holds a related emotional arrangement. Birth and bereavement occupy the same home, not as opposites that cancel each other but as facts demanding simultaneous attention.
The Norcross studio becomes the equivalent of that table, a working space where happiness, pain and oddness can coexist without being polished into one mood.
It explains why the artist calls this his broadest range of life experience so far.
Don Rello Reckons With Fatherhood And Loss On ‘I Don’t Watch TV III’
Rello’s cited influences widen the frame. He names the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., Donny Hathaway’s “You’re Gonna Make It,” Earl Sweatshirt and Uncle Al’s “Your Dying,” and Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out as recordings that sent him back to reconsider his life in the studio.
The references point toward an ear for pressure, survival, confrontation and form. They do not claim that I Don’t Watch TV III repeats any one source.
They establish a lineage that uses the album for hard questions and close attention to voice.
For readers seeking independent Hip-Hop/Rap album criticism that centres process as much as product, Don Rello’s new release offers a valuable case.
Its significance rests in making a concise record amid irreversible change. Rello also performed in Patrick Zae’s “High Notes on Krog” series last year, an appearance he calls an honour among artists and creators.
That detail places the record beside a local creative community. How many rap albums can hold a home, a grief, a new child and a working practice in the same frame without asking any one of them to disappear?
https://open.spotify.com/album/3rSMppqawhBljsb2zQJ9nD?si=w2wv4fBvRA-k4Ka3fXp41g
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