Oatmilkandcodeine - David Kratomberg: Worst Hits
Noah Galkin
Jan 4 2026
It’s 2 AM at a strangers’ New Years apartment party, and you and a new friends’ mission to find ketamine has yielded results. A twitchy, greasy, kind-hearted crypt-keeper leads you both to one of the three bedrooms (he knows one of the hosts) and rewards your long journey with a healthy line. You step back out into the main area through curtains and realize that the apartment is actually a two bedroom. You lose your new friend and stumble blankly through the crowd to find your roommate for a beer run. As you make your way through you begin to slip a little from temporality. There’s a Bladee song playing. What do you remember that song sounding like the next day?
Oatmilkandcodeine’s particularly removed take on cloud rap feels like an approximation of that sound; a memory of music in a drugged-out moment where the music neither comforted nor conformed with the feeling. Everything he does is engulfed in a mist compression and distortion, his vocals often barely registering as more than an autotuned whimper. His instagram name is ‘The Angel of Psychosis.’ Checks out.
After minimal Reddit-sleuthing, Kratomberg (that’s probably not his real name but I’m going to go with it) is loosely associated with two rap collectives: Haunted Mound and Shed Theory. He appeared in some old vlogs, maybe there was a falling out. They are obvious reference points when listening to his music, but there’s a dark sincerity to Oatmilkandcodeine that posterizes him as an outlier. His gory, zombified persona makes Haunted Mound look like pop stars. His droning, strung-out wail makes Shed Theory look like a stand-up troupe.
David Kratomberg: Worst Hits, the latest from Oatmilkandcodeine, is a refinement of his sound, whether intentionally or not. It conjures a dimly lit and spiritually grating atmosphere — a listen all the way through is the listening equivalent of drinking alone with the lights off and falling asleep in your jeans. Whether this release is a compilation or an official album, the music is both depressive and hypnotic when consumed in this quantity.
It also suggests a possible new path for ‘ambient rap,’ a genre name I’m stealing from an NTS Guide To. This is inaccessible beyond slurred speech and maxed-out-low-ends — everything is melting into an incomprehensible drone. As a good amount of underground rap does (listen to anything from the 1c collective), Kratomberg shares a lineage with Black Kray and SpaceGhostPurpp in the choice to wallow in the unrefined. But if SALEM and Chief Keef were reference points for Black Kray, Oatmilkandcodeine was listening to Bladee and James Ferraro.
In the Nina Protocol interview with Oatmilkandcodeine, he doesn’t seem to know anything for sure. He can’t remember recording his verse for ‘Canary Wharf Freestyle’ because he was “off a yerc.” He claims the blood all over his face and limbs in his cover art was from a “ritual blood letting,” which seems painful to replicate so many times. Other answers are slightly curt, sparing of details which may provide insight into his process or his peers. He doesn't have to share, of course. But there’s a connotation here of a life memory-holed by addiction.
Worst Hits is an album (if it is an album) about doing ketamine and having crushes, from what I can gather. On ‘the plan,’ he sings: “I just need to pop a little perc to vibe with her, lie with her.” Needing drugs to feel comfortable with intimacy is a pretty explicit issue to put on record, but the thought is ultimately washed away by sputtering sound effects and gauzy synths. When asked by Nina Protocol if he likes “to make music in an altered state,” he replied, “No comment.” Worst Hits feels simultaneously like the comment he didn’t give, and a separate thought that a comment won’t matter the morning after.
FIVE YEARS ON
Oatmilkandcodeine has yet to find himself as a songwriter, although there are vague promises scattered across Worst Hits. While the project does build an interesting atmosphere, I doubt it is catchy enough to gain significant traction considering the pop emphasis of the current London alternative scene. In five years, it’ll help signify underground rap’s move into pure drone.