Veteran hip-hop fraternity duo Clipse (Malice and Pusha T) put out their fourth studio full length, Let God Sort Em Out, just a few days ago, and a sudden underground thrust imploring us to chuck down a few words about it immediately took over. We were all powerless to deny it. The LP marks the rapper pair’s first project as Clipse since 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, which preceded the tectonic industry splashes of Lord Willin’ (2002) and Hell Hath No Fury (2006). In the sixteen years since their last full length, everything but the kitchen sink has happened. Senior bother Malice quit the group in 2010, briefly changed his stage name to No Malice by virtue of his conversion to Christianity, only to reappropriate his original moniker a few years ago. King Push, on the other hand, went on to successfully pursue a consummate solo career that involved the release of four records as well as a couple high-profile rap feuds. The storied Virginia outfit then saw fit to reunite in 2019 for a guest version on none other than Kanye West‘s Jesus Is King—which kinda leads us to this thing coming out earlier this month to great anticipation and acclaim, after about two years of gestation.

Longtime collaborator and early DMV scout Pharrell Williams—who lent his production duties on each of the previous three Clipse albums—returns for Let God Sort Em Out, having overseen each of the thirteen cuts back-to-back, for a total runtime of just over forty minutes. The former Neptunes and NERD record producer extraordinaire also doubles as a featured guest on wax, together with a slew of marquee collaborators including John Legend, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Stove God Cooks, The-Dream, and Tyler, the Creator. Lead standalone single, the ominous and engrossing “Ace Trumpets“, first arrived in late May, alongside with the project announcement, while non-streaming promo-only single “So Be It” was initially released as a music video halfway through June. A day before the album dropped, Malice and Pusha windowed two more cuts from the big joint exclusively to Apple Music: the highly-anticipated K Dot-featuring “Chains & Whips” (also sporting some gnarly guitar work by Lenny Kravitz), and “So Far Ahead“. Oh yeah, and the album was low-key subsidized by leading French international fashion house Louis Vuitton (it was recorded at their Parisian headquarters). If you still hadn’t guessed it, this thing is a big deal in hip-hop.

The high anticipation for the drop was in no small part due to the fact that Let God Sort Em Out was allegedly initially slated for a 2024 release. Yet, in a turn of events that has had the music industry up in arms since the nuclear Drake–Kendrick Lamar rap battle last year, the album was stalled for a long time as Clipse’s then-imprint Def Jam Recordings—owned by major label Universal Music Group, this will become important in a minute—reportedly requested Kendrick Lamar’s guest bars on “Chains & Whips” be either censored or else they wouldn’t drop the record. Although the official explanation for the failed truce remains unclear, Pusha T publicly claimed in multiple interviews that UMG’s boycott stemmed from his and Kendrick’s ugly brawls with Canadian megastar rapper Drake—most notably via Pusha T’s 2018 diss track “The Story of Adidon” and the aforementioned generation-defining beef from last year. Crucially, a few months ago Drake filed a self-referential defamation lawsuit against UMG for its promotion of K Dot’s beef coup de grâce “Not Like Us“. Refusing to acquiesce, Clipse agreed to pay a seven-figure sum to stunningly buy themselves out of the Def Jam album deal, instead self-releasing Let God Sort Em Out via a distribution agreement with Roc Nation. Wow.

Now, with a few paragraphs of introduction out of the way, let us cut to the chase: this record is a near perfect hip-hop coalescence. More than any this decade, hell arguably since Kanye West’s Yeezus, this collection of tracks is a true blue masterclass display of sonic synthesis, sound curation, and creative extraction—at least on the mainstream front. We don’t jive with numerical scores over here, but this album is wall-to-wall rap enchantment, and would see it fly damn real close to the 10 sun. Malice and Pusha T’s bars are so carefully selected and lyrically impactful that virtually not a single word or ad lib is wasted on the album. Both of their enunciated, matter-of-fact flows coast in and out of pockets making each stanza sound like the most important thing you’ll need to hear this year. Pharell’s backtrack beats are so linear, synthetic, and one-dimensional that silence and space become fruitful allies in this no-waste mixing approach. That’s how even the slightest beat switch, such as on “P.O.V.”, feels like entering into a whole new dimension of sound. This is outta sight.

Nearly each single one of the thirteen numbers features a lone driving beat motif that gels its track from front to back. Whether that’s bass, piano, horns, strings, or percussions; everything sounds so necessary. And sanitized. The refrains are so few and far in between that not only do they feel like they could get modularly stitched to any of the songs on the tracklist, but they become so memory-engrained and sticky it’s ironic for an hip-hop outfit known for its hardcore rapping, anti-earworm chorus stance. Clipse have always heavily relied on their grooves, beats, and production, but this exploit feels like they have finally perfected their acclaimed trademark songcraft. The music on Let God Sort Em Out is all-enveloping, hypnotizing, ethereal, and just so damn thick. There’s a gelid, cold industrial tapestry that bookends the forty minutes of material. And precisely because one is to assume there are so few individual tracks in each of the record’s partial stems, this kind of overture allows for each sonic pillar to crank up to eleven, and go assemble a muscular gesamtkunstwerk that lines up thirteen architectural marvels on the tracklist.

As most people undertaking creative endeavors know, reducing and essentializing a work of art is so much harder than adding bells and whistles to it. As celebrated American writer, humorist, and essayist Mark Twain famously said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Less than an artistic compromise, knowing how to cut what fat and which darlings to kill oughta be seen as a purifying act of love toward the art being made. In the Apple Music interview hyperlinked above, the Virginia Beach duo revealed how nothing was left on the studio’s cutting room floor—the thirteen records that made Let God Sort Em Out were all they wrote. A rarity in today’s bonus tracks/B-sides/deluxe version streaming obsessed climate. This is a pursuit of clarity and distillation. We can’t think of a rap outing that hasn’t done that better than this album in a long, long time. Naturally, by virtue of spacing out the recordings so much and weaving constituent room for certain segments to breathe, the Thorton bros rhymes stand out like crown jewels. On this album, the vocals are so front and center it’s not even funny.

When Malice dedicates all his bars to this old man on the parental tribute opener “The Birds Don’t Sing”, he achieves spiritual heights on passages like “I can hear your voice now, I can feel your presence / Askin’ “Should I rap again?”, you gave me your blessing / The way you spelled it out, there’s an L in every lesson / ‘Boy, you owe it to the world, let your mess become your message’“. Conversely, King Push’s articulation on track number seven “M.T.B.T.T.F.“; “My presence, your plеasure / Peasants, he’s prеssure / I been knee deep, ki deep / We at ZZ’s, me and Lee Lee / Get you fronted for the summer so easy” is so cold-blooded and sinister that quite literally no one else could deliver it the same way. What’s even more remarkable is that unlike the reputation that precedes them, Clipse manage to pull such a compound stunt off while keeping cocaine bars to a bare minimum—instead opting for obscure financial report jargon on the unforgiving “E.B.I.T.D.A.” (acronym for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization).

The latter is arguably one of the fastest beats Pusha T ever laid vocals on. And yet, in spite of—or precisely because of—the heightened BPMs, the 48-year old former GOOD Music label president manages to invokes the central mantra that underpins this album: “I need more space to make pace“. Every his wish is Pharrell’s command. With a producer-rappers chemistry completely off the charts, for God’s sake, these gentleman are literally related and from the same childhood neighborhood, it’s no wonder each piece of music on here sounds indispensable. This is an outstanding project in the mainstream hip-hop space precisely because it stands out from the pack so much. Alas, the intention with which each single sonic nook and cranny is perfected feels like a lost practice, a manufacturing no longer worth engaging with. Well here we are stating the opposite: this shit still matters. Mostly because it sounds so freaking good. Mark our words—not Pitchfork‘s—this record will land in the upper single digit rankings for most of the Albums of the Year lists you’ll be checking out this November. Let God sort those out.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

[***spoiler-free***]

We went to see the movie Sinners in theaters. Twice. We’ll watch it again. We’ve also been listening to the Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson-supervised Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, acting as the commercial companion to the incidental Original Motion Picture Score (fully written and arranged by the award-winning Swedish composer—it has gotten a fair amount of spins itself). For the uninitiated, the blockbuster opened in theaters on 18th April, and is a US Southern gothic supernatural horror joint by 39-year old Californian film director, producer, and screenwriter Ryan Coogler—of Black Panther and Creed fame. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, and Jack O’Connell, the movie is distributed by Warner Bros Pictures and at the time of this writing fares as the seventh highest-grossing film of 2025, having received widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The motion pictures narrates of identical twins Smoke and Stack Moore returning to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, after a multi-year stint working for Al Capone in Chicago. Leveraging illegitimate funds stolen from outlaws up in Illinois, they acquire a decaying sawmill from local racist landowner Hogwood, with the intention of converting it into a blues-infused juke joint for the local black community overnight. Their cousin, ‘preacherboy’ Sammie, a gifted and aspiring guitarist, joins them despite his pastor father Jedidiah’s warnings that messing with blues music means invoking the supernatural. The twins also go on to recruit blues pianist Delta Slim and singer Pearline to boost their line up—as well as Smoke’s estranged wife Annie as cook, local Chinese shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow as suppliers, and longtime field worker Cornbread as door bouncer.

On account of this premise, the full movie takes place over a narrative arc of 24 hours, from dawn to sunrise, as it were. True to its loaded title, it leaves no character able to cast the proverbial first stone. Above all though, it recounts of the power of soulful, dangerous music, summoning ancient tales of Faustian bargains involving legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, as well as of grit, persistence, and defiance. In it, belief and damnation aren’t presented as a discrete dichotomy, but rather as a continuum into which different people can strive to insert themselves. Some of them will stick their landing more toward the hell-bent end of the spectrum, whereas others will manage to redeem themselves by doing good. Or at least, better. The film displays remarkable performance by a slew of extremely well cast actors, but its main protagonist is undoubtedly blues music.

Music not only low-key furnishes utilitarian plot elements that weave together a robust, catchy, and well-rounded narrative, but acts as a fourth-wall of sorts, upon which rests a whole Stranger Things-esque premise of good vs evil. Unlike the Netflix teen-horror sensation, in Sinners the upside down is journeyed through the conjuring of otherworldly blues music. Music with a message, with a heart, and with a purpose. Music that served as triage for a peoples faced with all systemic injustices and structural exploitations of this world. Thing is: when played by the right person, blues riffs and licks crack open the Venn diagram separating heaven from the abyss. More often than not, with unintended consequences that tally up in communal baggages carried on by generations.

That’s what so relatable about the screenplay and its execution. Absent the cinematic bells and whistles tied to folkloric allegories that envelop the aptly unraveled story, the movie tells of a time and a place that occurred not even a century ago. Memories of societal textures, political orders, and civic mechanisms are still vivid in a lot of people’s minds, especially those of African American descent. Sinners presents us with a window into a slice of society whose perspective was completely negated at the time, and in doing so offers us a restaurant menu from which we can cherrypick who and what we want to see ourselves in. This thing has black people, Asians, native Americans, and of course the white. In many ways, the juke joint launched by the Moore bros can act as a Petri dish for the many communities we live in. The storytelling device of setting it during the segregative Jim Crow-era US South renders it poignant and important, but the greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness of most characters is timeless.

The feeling of belonging and the fight for self-preservation run deep in the thick plot—yet incidentally, those are two of the main motors that power the engines of blues rock. Most music stemming from heart-on-sleeve honesty, truly. Case in point: when local pastor Jedidiah bestows the cautionary tale upon his preacherboy son about the dangers of ‘bringing evil home’ by playing blues on the cursed guitar, he appears to be doing so while well aware of the artistic might of the music style in question. Unwavering, Sammie politely listens to his father’s dire warning, but still proceeds to join Smoke and Stack in their entertainment venture. In Sinners, much like real life, everyone has their own self-centered agenda, and is ready to go quite at length to impose its devils unto others. Whether in a dignified way or not, that’s for Belzebuth to determine.

The movie is far from a survival of the fittest, winner-takes-it-all parable though. Compassion and humanity surface to the top for a sizable chunk of the characters, good or bad may they be. This dynamic renders them well aware of the misdeeds they are committing, albeit not quite while they are committing them. L’esprit d’escalier. Without giving anything away, after repeated screenings of this flick, the sensation is that the sincere power of community—brought together inside the juke joint by the Moore twins—enacts a vessel that helps demystifying the cynicism of everyday life, bringing patrons and owners alike to the realization that their lives are more than the sum of their daily decisions. Uncompromising and unapologetic with respect to staying true to their innate identities, various protagonists in the feature film do seem to want to do the right thing. When amongst peers, they become selfless and free; all of a sudden their thirst for petty revenge fades into the background.

In typical Göransson fashion, the commercial-leaning soundtrack LP he curated features as a diverse an array of acts as trap singer Don Toliver, blues mainstay RL Burnside’s grandson Cedric Burnside, English alt-pop giant James Blake, Alice in Chains-founder Jerry Cantrell, Chicago Blues godfather Buddy Guy, as well as disgraced R&B singer/songwriter Rod Wave—who penned the official lead single for the Various Artists compilation. Blues is by definition anti-snob music. Blues is lunch pail and shovel music. Reflectively, Sinners is for everyone. The incidental original score by the 40-year-old Swedish musician, composer, and record producer is gripping and asphyxiating, whether synched to the moving images or listened to in audio-only isolation. Yet it is none the less an evocative recall of the range and dexterity of the underlying blues music.

“All money come with blood, baby“, says Smoke to Annie at one point in the movie, as she questions him about the dubious provenance of the cash stash he brought back from Chicago. Seas of blood and violent deaths are certainly not in short supply in here—yet the most lethal weapon of them all might just turn out to be a six-string with the right chord progression.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

When it comes to spitting dexterity on the mic, one would be hard-pressed to name anyone with more natural lyrical prowess than Columbus, GA-native rapper Brandon ‘BEZ’ Evans (B Easy). One half of the recently minted experimental/electronic hip-hop duo Revival Season, jointly with beatmaker Jonah Swilley, the gifted wordsmith has been at the rap game for about a decade at this point. Sporting a five-project strong solo discography of his own—with 2023’s Trap Sabbath as the clear standout amongst it—the MC managed to turn industry heads in spades at the beginning of last year, as he and Swilley dropped the exceptional Golden Age of Self-Snitching.

Revival Season’s 14-track debut LP clocks in just shy of forty minutes of runtime, and it’s an all-killer no-filler exercise in alternative hip-hop, with several indebted nods to electronic, funk, and dub music. Handily one of the most exciting rap debuts in the first half of the 2020s decade, Golden Age of Self-Snitching introduced the erratic duo to the world by way of zany, catchy, and carefree rap cuts more akin to cypher-like streams of consciousness, than cohesive label concept tapes. Owing their creative footprint to Linkin Park, Kendrick Lamar, Fever 333, Black Thought, and Mach-Hommy all in equal measure, the record pierces through the listeners’ sonic membranes like the warm hug of an earwormy fire alarm sound.

The project was puzzle-pieced together entirely self-sufficiently, written both remotely and in person, and recorded in different makeshift locations—including a health centre and an ad-hoc setup in Swilley’s house. BEZ’s bars take your breath away, precisely because he is low-key delivering them breathless himself. Sample “Barry White” at number two on the tracklist, a joint that has the MC dish out one 16 after another like his literal life depended on it—not without subdued Kanye West hat tips (“penitentiary chances”, “Brandon”)—on top of what sounds like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” iconic six-string lick. The grandiose and spacey “Message in a Bottle“, on the record’s same front-end, carries more unhinged Yeezy worship (peep the “ultralight beam” refrain), but mostly turns into what’s perhaps the most immediate and irresistible groove on the whole album.

By contrast, the feet-swinging and heavenly “Last Dance‘ at number five would stand the test of time as a Petri dish of how to finally get the exhilarating EDM/rap crossover right—in spite of all the many kitsch attempts out there. If you only source one tune off Self-Snitching, we implore you to make it this one. In a different vein, the following “Boomerang” brings all the funk to the fold, and then some. Whether intentional or not, BEZ’s delivery on the tune seems to harken back to an early BROCKHAMPTON-era Merlyn Wood flow. The defunct boy band’s influence is immeasurable and contains so many multitudes at this point, we wouldn’t be shocked to find out that some of its ethos might have bled into Jonah Swilley’s DAWs and record plates. In the same breath though, switch your ears and attention to “Propaganda“, and you’d be forgiven to think that you’re hearing Mach-Hommy spitball over a lost Bob Marley instrumental—all the while A$AP Rocky jabs loose ad-libs from the other side of the studio.

Yes, Revival Season is that left-field. Testing never seems to come at the expense of social consciousness or thematic poignancy, though. It’s evident that BEZ holds Philly’s finest The Roots’ Black Thought in the highest of regards, and nowhere is that inspiration more present than on the gorgeous penultimate track “Eyes Open“. Flat-out lead rap hit material. Speaking of which, Heavenly Recordings, the PIAS-distributed UK imprint earmarking Revival Season’s debut full length, must have struggled big time when combing through potential lead singles for this thing. As a matter of fact, none of those that ended up chosen as part of the official rollout in 2023 (“Chop“, “Everybody“, and “Pump“, featuring Shaheed Goodie on guest vocal duties), actually received any mention in this piece yet. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

What I came up listening to turned out to be so pivotal. I was in Georgia during the time of Dungeon Family coming up, and that turned out to be a big shifting point in hip-hop. We heard a lot of this stuff before the world, the way of thinking, the way of dress, the movement, the sound, we were there for it… Prior to that the South was really gated out, and as time has progressed it’s become more of a dominant sound, where almost everything in the genre comes from that time period and the sound and the attitude that was built there. All that stuff was on the back of really strong principles, on the back of the home-cooked, country-fied, soulful background that was added into the hip-hop formula from the South.

So the spitter-in-chief, with respect to how the duo continues to forge its singular sound. Since dropping Golden Age of Self-Snitching in February of last year, the outfit has further kept pushing the envelope by teasing new music—presumably leading up to their next yet-to-be-announcet exploit. Last summer they released the deliciously addictive standalone single “Dim Sum“, and followed it up later in October with a collab joint co-signed by Japan-born, Los Angeles-based alternative rapper Shamon Cassette, titled “WHITE HOUSE BLACK“. Since then, the USA and the Western world have, well, changed materially for the worst in too many ways. Revival Season are hereby officially being summoned to return to the scene, continuing to strike while the iron (and the planet) is hot.

Yet, outside of a one-off show scheduled in Oregon this summer, little is known about the 2025 plans of self-ascribed “non-religious rap entity“. In times of slim pickings, we’d be remiss not to resort to the clue in the band’s own name. More than ever before, there is no time like the present to reanimate spirits, re-mobilize civic action, and reclaim human rights. If it’s true that the coming together of Brandon Evans and Jonah Swilley was a “a divine appointment … [f]oreseen by oracles and foretold by angels”, then such protracted Godsend intervention is of the utmost urgency. After all, it’s no secret that B Easy and his DJ were religiously moulded by Georgia׳s slew of Pentecostal churches—if Self-Snitching is the deliverance right out of the gate, we can’t imagine how good the New Testament is going to sound. 2025 has got to be Revival Season.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV