https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPjZmQAvk_8
Note: This is Hurricane from Kanye West’s new album Donda, the link won’t embed but it should take you directly to the audio on youtube; it’s available on all streaming platforms.
Kanye West has a reputation of taking his sound design very seriously, so this song is recorded and mixed very well. It starts with a full, low frequency bass and a basic kick808/rimshot pattern. The Weeknd is the first artist in this song, whose voice has a lot of reverb giving it a very spacey, wide sound. The reverb goes very well with his melodic tones, and the sounds in the beat are very low/mid frequencies, giving his vocals a ton of room to breathe and be heard. His vocals are multi-tracked, having layers that are higher pitches which blends really well with his main vocal. The hat pattern comes in and has a really cool effect where it pans back and forth, especially heard in headphones. The hat, typically a high frequency, is rather low for a hat sound. The combination of the two allows for it to blend really well and stay out of the way of the vocals.
When Kanye and Lil Baby have their verses, they do not have as much reverb, which fits since they are rapping so it makes their annunciations more clear. Lil Baby has slight autotune on his verse. An organ chord patterns come in for their verses which have higher frequencies, but it blends better with the verses than it would with The Weekend as his vocals and the organ are in similar registers. The last effect I really like at the climax of The Weeknd’s hook, there are added choir/vocalist layers, giving it a gospel feel. These layers are blended well and are very heavy, consisting of reverb. What I love about it though is the song brings in complete silences after all the layers are together, which is very drawing to the ear because we expect to hear the feedback and echos of these voices, but are met with silence instead. It is an unnatural effect, but from an artistic standpoint it is creative because it creates that effect of disconnect between what our ear hears versus what our brain wants us to hear.