Click album cover to D/L.

The last time I was at a house party, a dude who could not handle his liquor (four drinks in he was puking in someone’s bedroom) became very upset at a former girlfriend and proceeded to defile her character in all sorts of horrible ways in front of everyone in attendance. The last time I was at a club with a group of people whom I mostly didn’t know, I spent the majority of the night practicing my lip-reading skills (of which I have none) and nodding at what seemed like appropriate times during the course of a dozen meaningless conversations with people I will probably never see again.

Thank goodness, then, for music like Stevie and Sam’s SwimSuits, the soundtrack to a fantastical world where every hot girl at the party wants to go down on you, and every night out at the club feels like you’re kicking it in someone’s living room with a thousand of your closest friends. That’s the reality SwimSuits (and its other similar electro-R&B/rap ilk) exists in. It’s fun. It’s hedonistic. It’s impossibly expensive. And it’s a pleasure to see a crew from Seattle parroting the themes of more well-known taste-makers who share the same subgenre.

Stevie and Sam don’t do it as well as Frank Ocean or The Weeknd, but not for lack of trying. They’re not excellent vocalists yet, though both are effective in imparting the flippant casual cool that’s so vital to the mood. State Of The Artist’s TH lends his gravelly MC register to “Timeless Opulence,” a lifted bass-heavy slow-roll that celebrates a contented rap-life stasis derived from being high either off drugs or your own delusions of grandeur. Themes and aesthetic remain mostly the same throughout SwimSuits with Stevie and Sam bouncing their cocky brag-rap/sing off electronic soundscapes awash in keyboard waves and bounding with rapid high-hat and electronic adornments.

Unrelenting talk of debauchery aside, there’s a detectable element of innocence here. Almost like Stevie and Sam don’t quite know what it is they’re engaging in, even though they’ve seen it a thousand times before on television. Frank Ocean can’t help but bare a cautious optimism that’s betrayed by his old soul. The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye seems to have already hit bottom and is trolling the void for as many good times as he can before beginning the essential steps toward survival. Stevie and Sam still have room to grow into their indulgences, both musically and habitually. For this duo, a million different directions are possible and virtually all are promising.