If you’ve ever wandered through a city night with your headphones on and a lump in your throat, Muhammad $mith’s latest double single Sadboi/Happyboi is going to feel like a mirror. Released on March 21, 2025, this hauntingly honest two-track offering from the New York-based artist captures the complicated push and pull between emotional heaviness and quiet hope. In just two songs—DREAM2U and SOLOW—Muhammad $mith solidifies himself as a distinctive voice in the emotional trap and alt-hip-hop scene, unafraid to show vulnerability through a lens both personal and poetic.
Known as a member of the genre-defying collective Dancingwater, Muhammad $mith’s solo project is a more intimate, introspective venture. With a name that fuses the world’s most common first and last names, he reclaims identity in a world that often tries to flatten it. As a Muslim artist navigating Western cultural noise, $mith leans into contrasts, contradictions, and duality. That’s the soul of Sadboi/Happyboi—the tension between longing and detachment, connection and collapse.
The first track, DREAM2U, shimmers with the sort of synthetic sadness that makes you want to stare out of a cab window in the rain. Built around a woozy, atmospheric trap beat and slow-drip hi-hats, it feels like a soft exhale. $mith’s delivery is muted but melodic, half-rapped and half-sung, like someone trying to talk themselves through another day. The lyrics explore the strange isolation of city life: constantly surrounded yet completely unseen, chasing a dream that might not even belong to you.
“Is the dream ‘success,’ or just something to fill the silence?” he asks, floating the question more to himself than the listener. There’s a subtle irony to the track’s title—it’s called DREAM2U, but it’s more about disillusionment than aspiration. Think Frank Ocean meets Juice WRLD in a downtown train station at 2 a.m.
Then comes SOLOW, and the mood deepens. Where DREAM2U is resigned, SOLOW is devastated. The beat shifts into darker territory, still sparse but more distorted, with synths that melt into shadows. This is where Muhammad $mith opens up the wound. He sings and raps about the end of a relationship, but it’s less about heartbreak and more about what comes after—the hollow, drifting numbness when everything you used to care about feels like someone else’s memory.
The lyrics don’t beg for pity. They reflect, collapse, and ultimately accept. “I made a mess just to feel something,” he confesses, in a voice so low it sounds like it’s buried under layers of regret. It’s that specific kind of sadness that doesn’t scream, but lingers—and it hits hard because it’s honest.
Yet despite the heaviness of both tracks, Sadboi/Happyboi never feels indulgent. There’s restraint here, a sense of precision in both production and performance. The sadness isn’t dramatic—it’s lived-in. And within that quiet honesty lies the magic of Muhammad $mith’s work. He doesn’t overproduce or overwrite. He simply lets the feelings breathe.
The project’s duality is its strength. Sadboi/Happyboi doesn’t choose a side—it lives in the liminal space, where grief meets daydreams and loneliness meets self-awareness. It’s a sonic meditation on growing up, breaking down, and somehow holding it together. The emotional transparency is refreshing, especially in a genre that often trades pain for performance.
With Sadboi/Happyboi, Muhammad $mith doesn’t shout to be heard. He whispers, and the world leans in. These aren’t just songs—they’re confessions, questions, and reminders that no one really has it figured out, but it’s okay to say it out loud.
If this is any indication of what’s to come, the artist who calls himself “the most common name in the world” is about to become anything but ordinary.
