Steve 'Flash' Juon“Winter Can Be Murder” is a 2019 album from Icy Narco, a rapper whose bio is surprisingly hard to nail down. His real name might be Rolando Gonzales and he might be from Miami, Florida. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page of his own and even his label for the album doesn’t list him on theirs. A lot of what I can tell you comes from music videos like “Hypocrites,” which has an “oh my God Ronny” drop in the intro, so Ronny J produced it. The beat is definitely the best thing here.
He strikes me as a mixture of 6ix9ine (minus the rainbow colors) and Trippie Redd in both style and delivery. While the former benefits from controversy and the latter benefits from catchy hooks and posthumous duets, Icy Narco only benefits from the former. In the curious world of rap you’d think an arrest would be enough to make you notable to Wikipedia, but given that it was a bench warrant for a traffic citation, perhaps that’s just not G enough. At least searching for his arrest led me to an article proclaiming his “triumphant return” on a new label, which might at least explain why 10K has nothing to do with him any more.
They were certainly trying hard for a little bit though. Tracks like “Link” managed to crack 10 million views with him rapping about “blueberries all in my teeth” and “taking the shoes off your feet” all while “shoot(ing) at the Uber,” the Lyft and the Coupe. Even though he vows that “real n*ggaz do real things” everything about this feels polished to an unreal degree. It feels like a record label calling all of the shots, trying to mold a young man into their new crossover Soundcloud Rapper. “Mad Mad” wasn’t a single but it certainly sounds tailor made for drive time FM radio play.
“Winter Can Be Murder” is only 22 minutes long, which is incredibly helpful given I was tired of him after about 11. Icy Narco is far from the worst rappers to come into the industry, and he certainly won’t go down as an all time terrible artist, but he has nothing that elicits future replay value either. This is a case of a marketing gimmick coming before the actual talent. Everything has to be so icy, so blue, so shiny, and so pitch corrected that instead of being distinctive and fresh it comes off as wholly generic and prepackaged. He’s like the Aldi brand cereal of AutoTune rap.