The chorus hits before you’ve had time to settle. Keem’s voice arrives warped, stretched thin over a beat that barely touches the floor, and then it loops. Twice. Three times. A Friday night phone call that stopped coming, and he can’t quite let go of the fact.
“Good Flirts” is a breakup song where nobody’s quite broken up, a track about the push-pull of an on-again, off-again relationship told from the perspective of someone who knows it’s over but keeps the memory warm anyway.
Keem’s chorus lays it plain: “It’s been over twice, it’s been over, we’ve been over.” The repetition isn’t laziness. It’s someone convincing themselves.
The production, handled by Keem himself alongside Teo Halm and Rascal with a writer’s credit to J Dilla, sits in a slow, low-lit groove.
What moves underneath is a patient bass, Keem’s harmonies processed enough to read almost as a sample, surfacing in flickers between the key hits rather than sitting on top of them. The negative space is the point.
When Kendrick hits a faster melodic pocket mid-verse, Keem’s production holds the floor calm beneath him, letting the stacked harmonies do the emotional lifting instead of the drums.
Momo Boyd, singer with New York group Infinity Song, runs the post-chorus, and she shifts the song’s mood entirely.
Where Keem sounds caught, she sounds free. “Ain’t coming home on a Friday night / I’m all good, my hips still wine.”
The double meaning of wine hits right. Movement. Rhythm. Sovereignty. She’s already gone.
What Keem does in verse one is easy to underestimate. His delivery sits in a hybrid zone, R&B feeling, rap structure.
The lyrics cascade over the pocket, water falling in slow motion, but the phrasing still follows a rap cadence underneath.
A line like “I ain’t never took you on vacation” reads on paper like a complaint. Sung, it bends into something softer, the vowels stretching just long enough to feel regretful before the rhythm pulls it back into place.
It’s the same instinct Kendrick noted during the Ca$ino rollout when he said Keem understood melodies and patterns better than any young artist he’d heard, and on this track, that understanding is doing most of the work.
Then Kendrick arrives. And he does something slightly strange.
He’s goofy. Deliberately, knowingly goofy. “Nibble on your ear, I never knew a love like this / touch your butt like this.”
He’s on the couch watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, he’s referencing his Iceberg jeans, he’s counting booty compliments like a man with nowhere else to be.
The bit runs four bars straight, missing, loving, kissing, crushing, and depending on your patience for that kind of extended riff, it either charms or starts to drag.
What’s worth sitting with is why Kendrick keeps choosing this register when he’s with Keem.
The goofiness is Kendrick at his most calculated: shed the competitive armour, run on teenager logic, and let the subliminal do its work quietly.
Buried in the middle of it all: “I gossip with my bitch like I’m Young Thug too.” A nod to Young Thug’s leaked jail calls, delivered so softly it almost disappears. That’s the method. The dagger lands hardest when the hand behind it looks relaxed.
There’s also this: “Rightin’ wrongs, ’til they come with royalties and pub too.” A publishing line on a love song.
You could read it as domestic vocabulary, righting wrongs at home until someone pays you for it, but it sits there with weight.
Ca$ino arrives five years after The Melodic Blue, and “Good Flirts” sits near its centre as a deliberate exhale.
It fits the pgLang model precisely: restraint over spectacle, intimacy over scale, a Kendrick verse that could have gone anywhere and chose the couch.
What pgLang has built, across every Keem and Lamar collaboration, is a domestic rap space, a place where the most competitive rapper alive gets to stop competing and where a young artist gets to grow without being rushed into a persona.
In 2026 where features are routinely turned into battles, that’s a rarer proposition than it sounds. Keem’s voice is the last thing you hear, riding out over a beat that’s already halfway gone.
The most radical thing about “Good Flirts” is how little anyone tries to win.
Ca$ino is out now on pgLang / Columbia.
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