Local Review: b.cola — There Must Be Others

b.cola
There Must Be Others
Self-Released
Street: 07.11.2025
b.cola = Common + (Hobo Johnson – the funny stuff) + Vaporwave backtracks

Local rap artist b.cola’s album There Must Be Others will take you on a ride through the mind of the artist, 15 tracks of slam poetry with a static vapor feel. There Must Be Others was written by and for a certain breed of bandcamp rappers, a very specific subgenre of rap that finds its niche and even highlights other rappers of that community in track six, “The Others.” Departing from his previous album WRAP, a passion project mashing up lyrics of his favorite rappers and IDM beats, b.cola has now taken up the mic to put out his own thoughts surrounding struggles with anxiety, coping with difficulties of the current day and age, and living with loneliness. For all intents and purposes, we can consider this b.cola’s true debut album.

The opening track “Tina” sets the tone for the album, a spoken word cadence that continues through each song. “Paraphrases” welcomes you into b.cola’s world, where making music, navigating social gatherings, and even scrolling through social media invites a level of discomfort: “Read so many posts sometimes my eye twitches, one thing my feed could use is less news.” Track four was one of my personal favorites. “You Know Who You Are” is a callout to the guy we’ve all met who tries to act incredibly deep but ends up being more shallow than the first step of a kiddy pool. If I had to guess, there’s probably a particular individual b.cola is addressing here, but we all know someone like the guy he’s talking about. 

“The Others” is truly an homage to the artists in this sub-genre of rap that conceived this album. b.cola creates a verbal collage highlighting various bandcamp artists he sees as influential, a line or two dedicated to each of their legacies. Leading into track seven, “Vertigo,” which has one of my favorite back tracks on the entire album, b.cola leans more into a positive and upbeat tempo highlighting the hope of overcoming a difficult condition. Similar to “The Others,” “92 ‘Til” is a tribute to rappers, but more to the ones that raised the artist in the 90s as opposed to current members of their community. 

“Drivers” is the 10th track on the album and tells a story I can relate to: needing to hop on the road with nowhere to go while you seem to be spiraling downwards and the only thing keeping you going is the lines on the road — “Gotta keep moving / It’s how we survive.” We also get a brief vignette about a woman who is forced to keep on the road: “20 more trips / buys two more days / in the motel / where her family stays.” “Mirror Talk” displays the conversations we have with ourselves when nobody is watching, regrets we feel that nobody notices or cares about but that we remember and allow ourselves to hold as a defining piece in our own self-image. 

“Gray Van” is a strange one. I quickly began getting flashbacks to nightmares where I was being chased through changing landscapes, but the threat behind me kept pace no matter where I went. There’s a specific point in the song where the gray van follows our runner into a vent in a mall, which reminds me of a nightmare I had as a kid: running from a terminator-esque robot through my grandma’s house. Finding myself cornered in a hall, I turned back and ran towards the main room when out of nowhere, I’m running through an outdoor market with people speaking Spanish all around me. If I had to guess, this type of nightmare is pretty common. Without getting into the woo-woo dream interpretation side of things, I think there’s something powerful about the end of the song forcing the runner to stop and enter the van. 

“Stories I’ll Never Write” is a bit goofy but finds itself as one of my favorites. If you’re a fan of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone’s anthology series format, this song is for you. Three mind-bending short story ideas crammed into one song and after each, he says that he isn’t going to do anything with the story. Closing the album with a very sad tone, “Penicillin” touches on the broken and lost things that are left behind because people don’t hold appreciation for things that don’t follow the definition of perfection. 

There Must Be Others is not an album for everyone, with its dramatic backtracks and heavy vocals it can build a sense of unease that we all have felt in our lives (especially nowadays). The cadence of b.cola’s voice in the first song had me believing that it was going to be a more static intro with some buildup to follow, but through the course of listening I found that was just the style he was going for.  If you like pop-rap artists or higher energy music you may find yourself turning this one off, but if you’re looking for something dark and grungy to listen to on a night-in alone, b.cola has got you covered. I look forward to seeing what comes next from this artist, and with this album having been released mid-2025, who knows — we may have a new b.cola album coming sometime in the near future. —Damien Poelman

Check out more reviews of local music:
Local Music Review: Sheldon Priest — And The Lix
Local Review: CornerCut — Similarities

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