Rayhan doesn’t chase highs on LAZY BURNING. The Toronto artist documents the slow burn of survival instead—quiet damage, private victories, emotional contradictions that come with outlasting environments not built for softness. Eighteen minutes across six tracks, the EP moves at its own pace, unrushed and emotionally heavy, sitting comfortably in gray areas between confidence and collapse. This feels less like a release and more like a reckoning, sharply autobiographical without becoming diaristic, presenting life as actually lived: fragmented, indulgent, defensive, intimate, unresolved.
“So Goes It,” featuring Kataem and NAVIN, establishes the nocturnal tone immediately. Glistening keys, restrained bass, and late-night guitar textures provide a backdrop for reflections on reinvention, trust, and emotional detachment. Rayhan shifts between ambition and admission effortlessly, acknowledging both the hunger driving him forward and the numbness following. The introduction frames LAZY BURNING as a project about motion without certainty, ego, and fragility coexisting as products of the same experiences rather than opposing forces.
“SUMMER TUNE” softens the palette sonically but not thematically. Floating production contrasts with grounded realizations about mortality, peace, and the desire to protect what little quiet remains. The refrain that life is precious doesn’t land as a slogan—it feels hard-won, earned through years of running for life or being stuck inside his mind or on the grind. Rayhan speaks to emotional overload directly: surrounded by people, substances, opportunities, and expectations, yet feeling fundamentally alone. The track captures this paradox without resolving it.
“BONE MARROW” confronts incarceration, surveillance, loss, and psychological exhaustion with startling clarity. Rayhan addresses detention, prison sentences affecting people close to him, and dead friends, all delivered without spectacle. The approach emphasizes how normalized trauma becomes when inherited early, how survival instincts don’t turn off once you’re “out.” The track captures the emotional cost of hyper-vigilance, the weight of watching everyone’s moves because the feds are watching yours, the subdued feeling that comes from too many dead friends making you indifferent about dying too.
The “Barz” tracks push deeper into tension between dominance and damage. Rayhan speaks openly about decay, self-preservation, carving his own lane after being repeatedly discarded or misunderstood. His delivery oscillates between menace and exhaustion, mirroring the emotional whiplash of wanting connection while preparing for betrayal. People who took advantage when he was down now hate seeing him win, now want to be him. The shift from vulnerability to armor and back again happens within single verses, reflecting how quickly defensive mechanisms activate when softness proved dangerous.
Throughout LAZY BURNING, intimacy plays a complicated role. Love is present but tangled with dependency, distance, lust, fear of loss. Moments of tenderness get interrupted by intrusive thoughts or self-sabotage, reinforcing the EP’s core idea: healing isn’t linear, vulnerability doesn’t arrive clean. Rayhan examines relationships where the sex is fire and the tolerance for substances matches perfectly, but emotional availability remains fraught. The worship and the wariness coexist, privilege and paranoia sharing space.
“THIS THE LAST SUMMER I WANNA DIE” closes with a powerful, emotionally loaded finale that reframes the entire project. Rather than triumphant resolution, the song lands on fragile commitment—to stay, to try, to live differently. The statement feels tentative but real, capturing the quiet courage required to choose life after years of flirting with disappearance. The repetition in the refrain creates a mantra quality, as if saying it enough times might make it stick. This is the last summer for moving dope, making people cry, being broke, wanting to die. The whole squad is coming up, getting it popping right now.
Sonically, LAZY BURNING blends spacey synths, minimal percussion, and moody atmospheres, prioritizing mood over excess. The production never overwhelms the writing, allowing Rayhan’s voice—both literal and emotional—to remain front and center. Every track feels intentionally sequenced to reflect emotional fatigue rather than momentum, the pacing mirroring the lazy burning of the title: not explosive, not extinguished, just smoldering steadily.
Rayhan continues carving his own space in Toronto’s underground, more concerned with emotional truth than trend alignment. This is a project that doesn’t beg for attention but lingers after it finishes, like heat trapped beneath skin. The autobiographical writing asks for neither sympathy nor celebration. Instead, it documents what surviving looks like when the environments around you weren’t designed for your survival—the adaptations required, the costs accumulated, the fragile hope that maybe this summer could be different. Motion without certainty, burning without flames, surviving without pretending survival looks victorious.
B-Side Guys 
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