How 070 Shake Makes Music That Sounds Like Nothing Else
2024-09-29 · 5 min read
Danielle Balbuena, known as 070 Shake, occupies a sonic space that resists every genre label thrown at it. Part rap, part electronic, part shoegaze, part gospel, her music feels like it's arriving from a parallel dimension where those categories never separated. Since appearing on Kanye West's ye in 2018, she's quietly built one of the most distinctive discographies in contemporary music.
Her debut Modus Vivendi in 2020 was a revelation. Tracks like Guilty Conscience and Under the Moon paired arena-scale production with vocals that shift between whispered vulnerability and full-throated wails. The album drew comparisons to Kid Cudi and M83 simultaneously, which tells you how hard it is to pin down what she's doing.
The Kanye connection opened doors, but Shake walked through them on her own terms. While other artists who emerged from the GOOD Music orbit struggled to establish independent identities, Shake's sound was always hers. The ye feature on Ghost Town was a highlight specifically because her voice introduced an energy nobody associated with West's camp.
Petrichor in 2023 pushed further into experimental territory. Produced largely alongside longtime collaborator Dave Hamelin, the album traded Modus Vivendi's bombast for something more intimate and strange. Songs drift between genres within individual tracks, reflecting an artist who creates intuitively rather than following blueprints.
Live, 070 Shake is magnetic. Her stage presence combines punk energy with hip-hop swagger and electronic music's hypnotic repetition. Festival crowds who discover her for the first time tend to leave as converts. There's a rawness to her performances that studio recordings can only approximate.
She remains criminally underrated relative to her talent. In a fair world, 070 Shake would be selling out arenas. But artists who refuse to fit neatly into algorithmic categories often build slower, more devoted audiences. The people who know, know. And their numbers are growing with every release.
