Just before Christmas of 2017, Kaine Carter released a mixtape orchestrated by himself unto several free streaming sites, including DatPiff, Spinrilla, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The unmastered mixtape’s title is stylized as “𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐊𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬”. The cover art depicts Carter dressed in graduation attire and a gilded mask inspired by his namesake Kane, a North American wrestler who debuted on the World Wrestling Federation in 1997. Carter sequenced nine freestyles together defined by choppy yet immersive instances, such as abruptly reversing instrumental segments (”𝐂𝐲𝐫𝐨”) and crooning in a raspy falsetto drenched in reverb. His flows occasionally trip out of meter to meander around cadences (”𝐢.𝐎.”, ”𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐥𝐨𝐭” and ”𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦”). Kaine’s melancholy lyricism — illustrated in tracks like ”𝐟𝐥𝐚𝐰𝐬” and ”𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞” — gives listeners a brief tour of his somber mind. The tape’s featured guest Mucci Gane has his own EP recorded with Carter around the same time. The demo is a cluttered hodgepodge of alternative, lo-fi ”type beats” and cloudy trap, matched with some introspective subject matter just below his superficial ego. Through these songs, Kaine Carter loosely questions his independence under the influence in life’s unfair game. Themes of substance abuse and escapism add to his hopeless bubble, but at the surface the project still retains a distorted vibe of playful recklessness for its indifference to quality and expressed contradictions.