Leaving home doesn’t always mean leaving it behind. Sometimes it takes getting far away to realize just how much a place has influenced you.

That idea runs quietly through Omari Alltimer’s Research Forest, a collaborative project with producer MNTRY that looks back at the Texas suburb where he spent his formative years. Rather than treating the album like a scrapbook of childhood memories, Alltimer approaches his past from a distance, using music to figure out what parts of that environment still belong to him.

The Woodlands, located outside Houston, was a complicated place for Alltimer to grow up. He was raised in a community where he often felt culturally removed from the people around him. As one of relatively few Black kids in the area, fitting in wasn’t always easy, and those feelings became part of how he understood his hometown.

But the meaning of home changed once he left Texas for college in San Francisco. Away from the familiar streets and routines, the things that once seemed unremarkable started to carry more weight. He began thinking differently about the culture, sounds and experiences that had surrounded him growing up.

That tension gives Research Forest its identity. The album isn’t interested in deciding whether home was good or bad. Instead, Alltimer seems more interested in accepting that both can be true. You can outgrow a place and still be shaped by it. You can feel like an outsider somewhere and still miss it after you leave.

MNTRY helps bring that contradiction into focus through production that rarely stays in one lane. His beats are spacious and atmospheric but can become much heavier when the songs call for it, creating a backdrop that gives Alltimer room to move between reflection and confidence.

“4sho” provides an immediate sense of that approach, built around bright synths and a relaxed instrumental that leaves plenty of room for Alltimer’s delivery. “Everything Different” carries more weight, with denser production matching the rapper’s more animated performance.

Elsewhere, “Feeder Rd.” settles into a smoother pocket, while “Focus” puts the writing front and center. The songs don’t feel like separate chapters so much as different angles on the same question: what happens when you finally look back at the place that made you?

There are also traces of Houston’s musical DNA throughout the project. Alltimer grew up around the city’s distinctive hip-hop culture, including the influence of chopped-and-screwed music and the artists who continued pushing the sound forward. Rather than attempting to recreate that tradition, Research Forest seems to absorb it and translate it into something more personal and contemporary.

“The Cost” brings the project to a close without turning the ending into a grand statement. Alltimer sounds less interested in proving how far he has traveled than in acknowledging what the journey taught him.

That makes Research Forest feel less like an album about Texas and more like an album about perspective. Distance gave Alltimer the ability to revisit his childhood without being trapped inside it. The result is a poignant project about identity, memory and personal growth.

Listen to Research Forest here now: