Some albums sound like the world. Others sound like someone trying to make sense of it.
Zeke the Zombie Slayur’s I’m Glad I Made This sits squarely in the latter category. A restless, 26-track odyssey that feels like paging through an artist’s notebook: sketches, voice notes, revelations, breakdowns, and sudden flashes of clarity.
Brooklyn-born Zeke has built a career on defying categories. He models. He paints. He designs. He raps. He builds worlds from the ground up. And in I’m Glad I Made This, he turns that energy inward: confronting ego, envy, ambition, and love with the unflinching honesty of someone who’s seen both sides of the hustle.
“I decided to make my master the pursuit for artistic independence,” he says, and it shows. Every detail, from the engineering to the artwork, is Zeke’s own hand. The project began as a casual experiment but evolved into something far deeper: a meditation on identity, belonging, and what it means to be seen.
The album captures what it feels like to grow up under the bright lights of creation in contemporary America – particularly as a young Black man whose art is constantly both celebrated and scrutinised. There’s jealousy, there’s exhaustion, there’s the quiet ache of wanting to be understood. But there’s also hope. A kind of spiritual grounding that Zeke calls “the frequency of love.”
He’s not wrong to resist labels. “You say rapper, I say prophet,” he spits on “be right there,” collapsing the distance between self-belief and self-mythology. His sound draws from hip-hop but isn’t tethered to it; his storytelling is as visual as it is lyrical. Each track feels like a painting or short film — layered, textured, deliberate.
And then there’s the world around the music: Open Casket LLC, his label; Sushi Palace (@sushipalass), his creative production house; and a portfolio that spans Golf Wang modeling gigs to immersive shows like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a nomadic showcase of New York’s emerging art underground.
It’s easy to forget that Zeke – born Isaiah Nathaniel Benjamin – is only 23. A skater kid from Sunset Park, he once dreamed of art as escape; now, he’s built a life entirely out of it. A chance encounter with Tyler, The Creator when he was a teenager lit the fuse, but it’s self-determination that’s kept the fire burning.
What makes I’m Glad I Made This compelling isn’t perfection — it’s process. You can hear the searching in his voice, the tension in his rhythms, the intimacy of someone who’s still figuring it out but refuses to stop moving.
In an age obsessed with polish and performance, I’m Glad I Made This stands out for its rawness – the sound of an artist letting go of expectation and saying, simply, I’m glad I made this.
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