There is always something interesting about siblings making music together. Think about The Cavemen., P-Square, M.I Abaga and Jesse Jagz, or even the producer-singer relationship Ayra Starr shares with her brother Milar. Blood ties do not automatically create chemistry, but when the ambitions align, the music can begin to feel like a legacy project for everyone involved.

That sentiment sits somewhere inside Rocky, a new rap instrumental jointly produced by Buss Beats, real name George Okoro, and his younger brother, Chibueze, professionally known as Retro Boom Beats. Retro Boom Beats has had a longer run within the industry, but Buss Beats enters this collaboration sounding anything but secondary. His instincts already feel heightened, assertive, statement-making, especially within the heavy and rather haunting Drill soundscape both brothers build here.

Rocky opens with a looping piano chord. Almost immediately, eerie trap-crank percussion (feels like a metallic, gear-like sound) begins moving around the looping piano, while female vocal chops (sounds like soft moans) float across the mix, bringing a slightly sensual energy into what is already becoming a dark record. Then, about ten seconds in, the bass kicks.

From there, the song locks into that grimy drill gusto. The pace hardly changes afterwards. What the brothers do instead is manoeuvre the beat through pauses, brief withdrawals and sudden returns, keeping its basic architecture intact while allowing the tension to breathe. This particular choice is one of Rocky’s strongest points. It’s exciting when a record does not waste much time explaining itself with some dramatic preamble; here, the urgency and suspense arrive almost immediately. Rocky wastes no time in being Rocky.

Honestly, the music also seems fitting for film. There are moments here that could easily score a hot, fast-paced action scene. Still, there are also enough open pockets for a hardcore rapper to tear through. J Hus comes to mind. Skepta. Stormzy. PsychoYP could do something dangerous with it too. The beat carries a very recognisable UK drill character, although its usefulness is hardly restricted to that scene. It actually feels very multi-purpose in usage.

The melody itself is already communicating enough. To borrow loosely from one of my favourite communication scholars, Marshall McLuhan, the medium becomes part of the message — and the massage.

Localising that same lesson here, in this song, one experiences Rocky physically before there is even a rapper there to tell you what to feel. The braggadocio, ferocity, and hypermasculinity are right there staring you in the face, although those female vocal textures soften it a bit from becoming completely rigid.

This song would fit easily inside a gym playlist. It could soundtrack an intense workout, a mosh pit at a rave, or anything requiring that brief psy-op moment where the music makes you feel larger than yourself. Maybe that is Rocky’s real function. It inspires movement and imagination. It’s still hard to tell at the moment, until a rapper embodies the beat.

However, Buss Beats and RetroBoom appear to understand the mind of the kind of rapper this production is built for. Neither producer needs to be a hardcore spitter himself. What matters is being able to imagine the lifestyle, cadence and aggression that such a rapper would bring into the booth, then leaving enough room inside the production for that personality to exist. They achieve that with an intricate mesh of piano, bass, eerie vocal textures and those odd mechanical sounds running through the beat.

Flipside, unfortunately, Rocky is really, really short. It almost becomes annoying because the record ends with a cliffhanger effect. There is barely an identifiable outro. Just when the beat has fully pulled you into its environment, it is gone. Listening on repeat almost becomes necessary, and the abrupt ending robs the experience of the conclusion that its suspense seems to promise.

Still, Rocky remains an exciting introduction to Buss Beats’ artistry and another interesting entry in Retro Boom Beats’ growing production journey.

More importantly, there is genuine creative camaraderie between these brothers. Their symbiosis works. Rocky sounds like two producers chasing the same excitement rather than competing for space inside one record.

For Buss Beats especially, it is a promising precursor. Nigeria’s rap circles may be slim compared to its wider pop machinery, but productions like Rocky leave enough room for interesting genre-focused experiments to keep growing. It sits at 7/10.