How twisted imagery, razor-wire wordplay, and dark humor turn underground hip-hop into a beautifully unhinged ride.

How fast can an MC run his mouth before the punchlines start chasing each other around the room? Scatterboxx’s “Bad Fetish” has a pretty convincing answer: faster, stranger, and with considerably less concern for your comfort.

Released in 2018 and featured on Hypomanic Carnival, the track finds Boston-based lyricist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Sheils turning verbal excess into the main event. This isn’t rap built around a tidy slogan or a chorus designed to behave itself. It’s a three-minute collision of twisted imagery, gallows humor, and syllables that seem determined to trip over one another on purpose.

The imagery gets gloriously bizarre. One minute, we’re blasting off in a tiny spaceship bound for Vegas; the next, we’re dealing with lobster bibs, robotic octopus tentacles, and a narrator whose relationship with his own mind feels like a conversation happening in a room with too many open doors. Scatterboxx doesn’t simply stack strange pictures for shock value. He makes the absurdity part of the rhythm, letting each left turn set up the next verbal pileup.