Seoul’s own Loco has always rapped like someone who keeps one eye on the skyline and the other on his notebook—half-dreaming, half-documenting. With SCRAPS, his long-awaited third studio album, he turns that habit inward, reworking fragments of abandoned lyrics, half-finished beats, and orphaned hooks into a fully realized portrait of reinvention. Released July 8 via Warner Music Korea, the project isn’t just a comeback—it’s a creative rebirth.
The title says it all. These “scraps” are pieces of Loco’s past: demos that never saw daylight, ideas he once left behind when he was still AOMG’s golden boy. Now, polished into eleven sleek, shape-shifting tracks, they pulse with a sense of arrival. Loco himself frames the album as a reclamation project: “What once felt incomplete now shines with new life,” he says. And shine it does—though more like the quiet glimmer of streetlights on wet pavement than a blinding flashbulb.
Lead single “No where” featuring Indonesian singer-songwriter Feby Putri is SCRAPS’ emotional GPS. Over a haze of glossy synths and slow-thudding drums, Loco drifts through the ache of distance and disconnection, his voice caught somewhere between singing and sighing. Elsewhere, he bends his style into new shapes: the humid R&B inflections of “Dusked,” the globe-trotting swagger of “Circuit Breaker” with TAICHU, the jittery half-tempo rap of “Moths,” which feels like it was engineered for late-night subway rides.
The collaborations—Jordan Ward, Young Coco, 1MILL—add more than just star power; they make SCRAPS feel borderless, as if Loco’s internal map now spans Seoul, LA, Jakarta, and Tokyo all at once. This is hip-hop that’s grown up, taken a few flights, and learned to speak in multiple emotional dialects.
It’s also a statement of freedom. After more than a decade under the AOMG banner, Loco steps into his own lane here—less interested in chasing a hit, more invested in chasing himself. The beats are moody but spacious, the hooks sticky without trying too hard, and the verses quietly assured. If his past singles like “Hold Me Tight” and “HELLO” were about connection, SCRAPS is about reflection: taking inventory, letting go, and moving forward with nothing weighing him down.
With a year-end headline concert planned in Korea and promotional stops across Japan, Loco’s next chapter is already in motion. But SCRAPS feels like the real milestone—a time capsule of everything he couldn’t say until now, stitched together into something whole. It’s a rare kind of hip-hop album: intimate without being indulgent, experimental without losing its pulse, global without losing its Seoul.
In other words, the scraps were worth saving.
