“Glorious Game” by El Michels Affair & Black Thought
A strong outing from one of the best emcees working right now.
Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a soulful, often bittersweet hip-hop reminiscence featuring top-notch bars from one of the world’s most talented emcees.
Genre: Hip-Hop, Soul
Label: Big Crown
Release Date: April 14, 2023
Vibe: 📆
Perhaps no rapper in the game right now has had a quieter run of sustained excellence than Black Thought. Considering his work with The Roots and his quality solo releases beginning with 2018’s Streams of Thought Vol. 1, his technical brilliance ranks up there with established genre darlings like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator. His masterful combination of dizzying wordplay and laid-back tone is on full display on Glorious Game, his first collab with El Michels Affair, a funk/soul outfit led by producer Leon Michels. The warm, wistful instrumentals are the perfect platform for Thought’s most tender and vulnerable performance of his career.
Consider standout “That Girl,” an examination of a lost love that’s equal parts yearning and haunting. There are dense rhymes on display from the jump, including this passage from the first verse: “A queen nightingale and her wings whisper the sky a tale/The sun and moon are her biggest fans, they send her mail/Skin caramel, a magnetism none could parallel/From Venus to Vеnezuel, they call hеr Miss Michelle.” The throwback nature of the production empowers Thought to explore who he is, where he comes from, and memories linked to his formative years as an artist and man. Though it takes a few tracks to hit its stride, this is a hip-hop record guaranteed to age like a fine wine on repeat listens.
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