Today, Friday, October 23rd, Grammy Award-winning artist, producer, and visionary Ishmael Butler is releasing his kaleidoscopic new Shabazz Palaces album, It’s a Style Sport, available worldwide via Sub Pop.
 
The 10-track outing features the highlights ‘Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet),” “Jheri Curl Jump,” “Tongue in Chic,” “Field Notes,” and “From One Future To Another,” and was produced by Shabazz Palaces and Erik Blood, recorded at Circular Ruin Studios in Brooklyn (NY), Lake View Studios and Hall of Justice in Seattle (WA), and Parkman Labs in Los Angeles (CA). It was mixed by Blood at Circular Ruin, and mastered by Warren Defever at Third Man Mastering in Detroit (MI).
 
It’s a Style Sport features guest appearances from Marquette Miller, Thaddeus “Thaddillac” Turner, Evan Flory-Barnes, Gerald “Tugboat” Turner, Kassa Overall and Carlos Overall. 
 
It’s a Style Sport is a bold, forthright, and heavy-hitting album. Throughout, Butler compiles what he’s learned from his storied, dense career into a playful, shimmering portal, again proving himself an artist of chameleonic ambition, fueled by curiosity, courage, and a limitless imagination. 
 
Ishmael Butler has consistently explored music’s outer reaches for the last three and a half decades. In the early 90s, he helped pioneer jazz-infused hip-hop by founding Digable Planets, the Grammy Award-winning trio that released two landmark albums, toured with Sade, and still plays live together today. Butler’s creative rebirth as Shabazz Palaces began in earnest 15 years ago with the experimental, highly influential debut album, Black Up. Butler has continued to push boundaries over seven subsequent Shabazz Palaces albums, and his exemplary taste and verve has led to collaborations with Flying Lotus, Thundercat, George Clinton, Clipping, Battles, Oneohtrix Point Never, Animal Collective, plus his own son, Lil Tracy.
 
Shabazz Palaces has toured with Radiohead, TV On The Radio, and Ms Lauryn Hill. Additionally, Butler’s ability to spot like-minded visionaries, both in music and the wider creative cosmos, has led to striking visual output alongside filmmakers Khalil Joseph (Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, Kendrick Lamar) and Hiro Murai (Atlanta, Widow’s Bay), to incredible design work with Toronto artist/designer and his fellow Black Constellation member Nep Sidhu.
 
Shabazz Palaces It’s a Style Sport is available now on CD/LP/Digital from Sub Pop. LP orders from megamart.subpop.com in North America, Mega Mart Europe in the UK and EU, and your local record store will receive the limited Loser edition on Metallic Silver (North America) and Sparkle Starlight (EU/UK) vinyl (while supplies last).
 
More on It’s a Style Sport by Tasha Riley here. 
 

What People Are Saying About Shabazz Palaces’
It’s A Style Sport:
“The beats and production still feel a century ahead of their time. He’s pulling from the jazz, hip-hop, and electronic influences that defined early Shabazz Palaces, but continues to find new possibilities within these sounds.”  Bandcamp Daily
 
“No doubt, It’s a Style Sport is a praiseworthy achievement—an exercise in originality, almost a forgotten principle in
present-day hip hop.” Treble
 
“Recorded over eight days with players who’ve worked with Butler for years, the album boasts an unexpectedly loose, live feel.”
★★★★ SLANT
 
“…his musical map remains gloriously kaleidoscopic, spanning Sun Ra-style celestial Afrofuturism, reverb-drowned electro-funk and the luscious, trippy, retro-soul majesty of ‘From One Future To Another.’” UNCUT
 
“It’s a Style Sport is his eighth Shabazz Palaces album, with “Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)” offering the first glimpse. It’s a pick for listeners who want to hear where an artist can take rap when he refuses to stand still.” “Fall Culture Index 2026,” EBONY
 
”It’s a Style Sport explores memory as a tool for analyzing the grand mysteries. He’s always harnessed the aesthetics and swagger of eras past—’80s electro drums pepper the Shabazz Palaces catalog—but here, Butler takes a pointed look at his personal history for inspiration, indexing what he’s learned and where it led him. It’s a record rooted in gratitude, a serious and smirking ode to resilience and curiosity.” Pitchfork
 
“The eighth album from Ishmael Butler as Shabazz Palaces sees the mercurial, inimitable rapper and producer waxing philosophically (or carnally) over often live-sounding grooves alongside Washington State musicians like the sibling sax-and-drum duo of Carlos and Kassa Overall.” New York Magazine
 
“Seventeen years into one of the greatest second acts in hip-hop history, Seattle’s own Shabazz Palaces is still putting numbers on the board with new album “It’s a Style Sport,”…By now, former Garfield High School champion point guard Ishmael Butler — Shabazz’s leader and Grammy Award winner with Digable Planets in the ’90s — stands nearly peerless as a rapper/producer.” Seattle Times
 
“Ishmael Butler has a quantum physicist flow that collapses space and time. This profoundly freeform record mirrors the idea that “the future and the past are happening constantly and simultaneously.” That’s science!” VICE
 
“Over beats that range from hyper-dynamic, Afrofuturistic soundscapes to Italo disco synth melodies, It’s A Style Sport finds Butler at his most reflective. Across an array of different deliveries, he looks back on the loves, lessons and losses accumulated along the way without losing sight of what comes next.” [Feature] RANGE
 
“a jazz-tinted, noir-style, whirling set of ten spellbinding performances.” Glide
 
“Three decades in, Butler still makes big thinking look easy.”
RIFF Magazine

Shabazz Palaces
It’s a Style Sport
 
Tracklisting:
1. Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)
2. Field Notes
3. Show Me Missouri In Mink
4. Jheri Curl Jump
5. Deadstock Dude
6. Tongue In Chic
7. Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M.
8. Olivia According To Touch
9. Money Can’t Save Your Mind
10. From One Future To Another