brian ennals

Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Releasing music in relative obscurity can engender insecurity, the self-doubt mounting with every year critical acclaim and peer recognition doesn’t arrive. Brian Ennals was intimately familiar with that disheartening reality for a decade. Throughout the 2010s, the Baltimore rapper’s sporadic solo projects gained little traction, and songs with short-lived groups either languished on hard drives or were quietly buried on the back pages of small blogs. Following the release of King Cobra (Phantom Limb), his second album of brilliant tragicomic nihilism produced by fellow Baltimorean Infinity Knives, Ennals’ career narrative is slowly changing. “It was always weird to tell peo...