Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones)

The story behind Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) is an underground legend. In 2013, just as Jai Paul was exhibiting stratospheric promise (his first, and at the time only, single, BTSTU, was sampled by Beyonce and Drake in the same year), a collection of his unfinished tracks was allegedly stolen and anonymously leaked as an album on Bandcamp. This drew frenzy within the music world, and triggered the young artist to disappear without a trace for 6 years, stopping his rising career in its tracks. Despite the album’s lack of a formal release and fuzzy, unfinished mastering, it is cemented in many Albums of the Decade charts. It has had a far reaching influence on music, directly birthing the sounds of Mura Masa and Flume, with the likes of Kaytranada, Kenny Beats, Rostam, JPEGMAFIA, Caribou, Lorde, Ed Sheeran, and Anderson .Paak having professed their appreciation of his work, and countless others intangibly shaped by his sound.

It seems that Jai Paul’s music preconditions the use of bold language: it is rare to read a review of his work that doesn’t invoke space travel, siren songs, and alternate realms. So to call this album an immersive experience would be a gross understatement. At once outer-space and underwater, it drops you head-first into a soundscape of warbling R&B melodies wrapped in gritty textures. Paul harnesses negative space with an energy so visceral, it ricochets like a ball in a box. He bends the box to his will; shrinks and expands it, then completely obliterates it through abrupt pauses, cleverly slashing vocals out like a word caught in the throat. Out of the vacuum, it pops back into existence—blissed-out synths suddenly jump at you at full pitch, jolting the senses—and the ball hurls against its walls with greater vengeance than before. Paul is heavy-handed with his use of effects (despite countless listens, I can still be caught off guard by the pew-pew-pew of a rogue laser that tears loose from the mix to graze my ear), creating an atmosphere that leaves you transfixed, persistently on edge, and bracing for the next surprise to punch you in the face when you least expect it.

Sung as if drifting in through an open window, the lyrics on this album often draw on a handful of lines repeated over and over; yet rather than trite or unimaginative, I find that this repetitiveness conveys emotion with an earnest, raw clarity. In Genevieve, it is the crooning of a jilted lover, as Paul moves from hopeful to self-conscious to bitter, his words resembling incantations to spellbind the subject of his longing. In 100,000 and BTSTU, his voice drips with venom for his adversaries atop eerie, yet infectiously discordant melodies. I can only marvel at the prescience of these tracks in hindsight: being stolen from by vultures ultimately shaped his musical career.

I got my hands on this album during the last hurrah of my torrenting days, before it was officially released on streaming platforms in 2018. I remember scouring The Pirate Bay with a feeling of pride for being in on a big secret of the underground music scene. Being a third-culture kid still grappling with my own identity, I was immediately struck by how boldly Paul incorporates South Asian influences in his music. Str8 Outta Mumbai transitions seamlessly between old Bollywood samples, Western melodies, and Hindu prayers. Such a feat is possible only through the rich cultural tapestry of diaspora members like Paul, who carry the flavours, the colours, the subtleties—the music, really—of opposite worlds which can, in rare moments, be bridged through song. 

I often wonder why, 13 years on from its leak, this body of work stood the test of time so well. I suppose an obvious reason is that it contains scant temporal references, mostly a peppering of film and video game samples which, by the time the album came out, had already been relegated to our generation’s collective nostalgia (namely the Harry Potter and Tomb Raider samples from the original leak). To me, what makes this album so special is that it is not remotely derivative. While Paul’s music makes sense through knowledge of his influences (J Dilla, D’Angelo, Prince), I can’t really imagine it plotted as a point on the axes of their work; instead it defines a new plane, parallel or even perpendicular to theirs. It is as if he distilled their individual musical styles to their very essence, which he then used to craft a springboard from which to jump into a new dimension. This album is a delightfully weird impressionistic work, using broad strokes to paint an evocative picture, and that is what has lingered through the passage of time.

I also wonder what might have become of these songs (especially the jaw-clencher Raw Beat and the thunderous funk jingle Good Time, both under 30 seconds long) had they been honed and released in their final form, if released at all. This lingering “what could have been” has echoed through many a commentary on this album over the years, a question Paul himself grappled with as he sank into reclusion after the leak. Yet there is room for optimism here, too: this record of demos took the music world by storm in half-baked form because of its scrappiness, its futurism and the mystique surrounding its dissemination, not in spite of those things. Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) continues to captivate our imagination, and I only hope that Paul keeps his finger on the pulse and releases more worldbending music, this time on his own terms.