The Don of Diamond Dreams is available now, worldwide from Sub Pop.
Shabazz Palaces have delivered an official video for “Bad Bitch Walking (feat. Stas THEE Boss),” a standout from his acclaimed The Don of Diamond Dreams. The visual, which stars Ishmael Butler, Stas THEE Boss, model Shernita Anderson, and dancer-choreographer Tanisha Scott, was filmed in isolation in four cities across North America: Toronto, Seattle, Ontario, and Brooklyn.
Director Amhalise Morgan offers this of the video, “What drew me to this song was how visual the song sounds to me. I reached out to Ishmael and asked if he had a video yet and asked if I could write for it. He wanted me to have “complete autonomy” which was very empowering. The song is simple and sensual so I decided to focus on tight shots to really have the intimacy take center stage and the focus be the women and the performers. We are living in such precarious times and beautiful Black imagery is very necessary and needed. At times it feels like we can’t change the violence in this country nor the victims and the perpetrators but what we CAN do is contribute imagery that is beautiful, strong, yet soft NOT brutalized, marginalized, and disposable. I wanted all those in front of the camera to be timeless and regal so I gave both Ishmael and Stas the direction to wear white. It was also important for me that Shernita and Tanisha, be the personification of beauty that was void of objectification.”
PopMatters says of the video, “A sultry, locomotive shuffle of hip-hop and blue funk, “Bad Bitch Walking” features Butler as a susurrating lover whose languid gaze of a woman is slowly supplanted by the erotic ellipses of female motion. Morgan frames the images through an Afrosensualist eye, which proudly demonstrates the various colors and movements of Black beauty. At times, her camera inverts the male gaze so that Butler is often the desired object in view. “Bad Bitch Walking” also features a rhyme by Stas Thee Boss that further explores the use of the word “bitch” in hip-hop lexicon (see premiere September 2nd, 2020).”
The Don of Diamond Dreams is available worldwide from Sub Pop, and includes the aforementioned “Bad Bitch Walking (ft. Stas THEE Boss),” “Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate),”“Chocolate Souffle,”“Wet,” features contributions from singer/keyboardist Darrius Willrich, percussionist Carlos Niño, Knife Knights collaborator OCnotes, saxophonist Carlos Overall, and bassist Evan Flory-Barnes.
The Don of Diamond Dreams was recorded throughout 2019 and produced by Shabazz Palaces at Protect and Exalt: A Black Space in Seattle, mixed and engineered by Erik Blood with mixing assistance from Andy Kravitz at Studio 4 Labs in Venice, California, and mastered by Scott Sedillo at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Los Angeles.
[Photo Credit: Patrick O’Brien Smith]
This past weekend, Ishmael Butler hosted BBC World Service’s “Music Life” podcast, an enlightening conversation with guests IAMDDB, KeiyaA, and Bishop Nehru (listen here). And recently, Iggy Pop, on his Friday night BBC 6 Music shows played The Don of Diamond Dreams tracks “Reg Walks By The Looking Glass” (“I love this track,” says Iggy) and “Money Yoga.”
What ‘The People’ are saying about Shabazz Palaces The Don of Diamond Dreams: “[Shabazz Palaces’] spontaneity and irreverence for rap conventions feel particularly urgent; these experiments are malleable and resistant to form at a time when declarative statements on the current era seem futile. Instead, the group continues bludgeoning musical complacency with songs as equivocal as inkblot tests. “This is high art / I tear the form apart,” Butler raps on “Chocolate Souffle.” He engages in a conversation—albeit an ambiguous one—with contemporary hip-hop on “Wet,” and dives headlong into a puddle of free jazz on “Reg Walks by the Looking Glass.” But the surprise is the uncharacteristically concrete “Thanking the Girls”—an ode to Butler’s daughters that unfolds over a static-filled, beautifully off-kilter.” - The New Yorker
“For years now, Shabazz Palaces have oozed a kind of creative wisdom, the type that can only come with age and years of lived experience, but The Don of Diamond Dreams demonstrates a sign of even deeper wisdom: living an entire life of your own, and realizing that there’s still value in learning and listening from the youth.” - Pitchfork
“Through this long journey through different states of consciousness and emotion, Shabazz Palaces continue to serve as the intrepid explorers through the eternal form known as music. The don of diamond dreams and gold stitched jeans continues to shine his light on the path for all of us to follow.” - KEXP
”The Don of Diamond Dreams finds Butler’s effects-treated voice rippling through a prism of mutated funk and R&B that feels simultaneously sumptuous and deeply unconventional.” [8/10] UNCUT
“How many acts release five albums and how many out of that are still as current and relevant as on their debut? Not many. Shabazz Palaces have now joined a rare breed of artists. The Don Of Diamond Dreams is a glorious album that yields more and more with each listen. And listen you need to, because if you don’t you might miss something.” [8/10] - CLASH
“The Don of Diamond Dreams is the most fully realized Shabazz Palaces LP yet—from Butler’s new confidence in his own poetic authority to the way he and multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire create hip-hop songs that never stop experimenting.” [“Album of the Day”] - Bandcamp
“Through this long journey through different states of consciousness and emotion, Shabazz Palaces continue to serve as the intrepid explorers through the eternal form known as music. The don of diamond dreams and gold stitched jeans continues to shine his light on the path for all of us to follow.” - KEXP
“The Don of Diamond Dreams is a brilliant, buoyant work of provocation and invocation from the rapper-writer-producer. Holy, wise, abstract, and contagious, Don is intergalactic hip-hop that burrows as deep down as it does fly high.” - FLOOD Magazine
”The Don of Diamond Dreams prove Shabazz Palaces to be such a fascinating and exciting project in the age of algorithms and formulae.” [“Album of the Week”] The Guardian
“One of contemporary hip hop’s original outsiders” [★★★★] - Q
“The Don of Diamond Dreams…feels warmer and more optimistic…[It] feels imbued with a sense that alternative realities – different ways of telling stories, different mythologies to reflect our true nature – are always within our reach, if only we’re able to fully embrace our own imaginations.” - The Quietus
“Shabazz Palaces have created another exquisite album” - DJ Mag
“Expanding beyond their already broadened horizons, Shabazz Palaces are seemingly unstoppable.” [8/10] - The Line of Best Fit
“On the 10 track project, the Seattle artists continue to showcase their technologically - intertwined take on the experimental realms of rap and hip-hop, spicing up their Afrofuturist aesthetic with melty basslines, eclectic percussion, psychedelic synth pads, and more.” - Hypebeast
“The 10-track project is another futuristic ride through Butler’s otherworldly mind.” - HipHopDX
“Shabazz are at their best when they channel all their ambition into a more tightly-packed album like this one.” [Notable Releases of the Week] - Brooklyn Vegan
“[Shabazz Palaces] remain immersed in surrealism, but their atmospheric oddity ends up a splendid fit for today’s hip-hop landscape.” - RIFF Magazine
“The Don’s way of pulling you in is to hypnotize you with far-out jazz pageantry and devotion before cutting you loose to wander through the brilliant, idiosyncratic landscapes they created – and they make it look effortless while doing it.” [★★★★] - Spectrum Culture
“Diamond Dreams is immersive and solidifies Shabazz Palaces’ stature as one of the few hip-hop projects to emerge in the 2010s and create a wholly distinctive genre unto itself. Its intergalactic textures don’t resemble earth, but that’s a welcome escape at a historic moment when earth doesn’t feel particularly inhabitable for humans.” [The Don of Diamond Dreams] - PASTE
“[Shabazz Palaces] have managed to continue Butler’s relentless desire to reimagine what hip hop should and could sound like while boldly proving that they’re the heirs to the astral imaginations of Sun Ra, George Clinton, Octavia Butler and Alice Coltrane.” - Joy of Violent Movement
“WORKING” is an empowering new hip house track and official video from Cartel Madras, which was directed by the group and Gabriela Osio Vanden. The visual, which stars the duo and fellow THOTNATION collective member Jide (who produced and mixed the song), saw it’s premiere earlier today at Berlin’s Pop Kultur Festival. “WORKING” marks Cartel Madras’s first new material since the release of their Age of the Goonda EP late last year, and is available now through all DSPs worldwide through Sub Pop (with the exception of Canada from Royal Mountain Records).
Single Art Photo Credit: Oliver Whitfield Smith
Cartel Madras’s Eboshi and Contra had this to say about the song, “Ever since ‘Housey’ off of our first mixtape, Trapistan, we’ve been really excited to make our next house track. In terms of hip house, we’ve been influenced by the likes of sharp lyricists with strong aesthetics such as Azealia Banks and Cakes Da Killa; they’ve been genre touchstones for us since before Cartel Madras. Much like ‘Housey,’ ‘WORKING’ is a queer, party track which pulls from our experiences as bad bitches in the music scene from the LGBTQ+ community. Once Jide, also a member of our collective, made us this beat we knew exactly what we wanted to do with it. This video is a love letter to the campy, color-coded Eurodance videos of the 90s.” And producer Jide offers this, “‘WORKING’ is heavily inspired by artists like Disclosure and Geotheory. I wanted to go for a vibey UK House track. I wanted some tension and didn’t want to give it to you all at once.”
“WORKING” was produced as a commissioned work of the Pop-Kultur Festival, funded by FACTOR Canada and the Government of Canada.
What people are saying about Cartel Madras: “They’ve got an absolutely wicked flow — think M.I.A. meets Cardi B. Hints of traditional Tamil music are sprinkled throughout.” [“Goonda Gold”] - Stereogum
“Cartel Madras are smashing barrier musically and are sure to blow your mind with their uniqueness.” [Age of the Goonda] - CLASH
“Full of raw, powerful, nonchalant energy” [“Goonda Gold”] - Gal-Dem
“Age of the Goonda is an invigorating five-track blast…More, please.” - The Wire
“Comprised of six tracks, the EP possesses layered bass lines pumped with adrenaline, a range of Indian classical instruments weaved in and hooks that stay in your brain for days.” [Age of the Goonda] - NME
“Age of the Goonda provides an electrifying burst of the duo’s live show energy in concentrated form.” - Loud & Quiet
“In pop analogy, this hip-hop duo comprising Calgary-bred, Chennai-born siblings Bhagya and Priya Ramesh is somewhat like a Tamil Pulp Fiction-meets-MIA. With a carousel of bad-ass, no-fucks-given, brown girl anthems, Cartel Madras is brought to life by two sisters who don’t shy of braggadocio (you can’t miss their stack of gold jewelry) as they spout songs about feminism, empowerment and inclusivity.” [“12 New Musicians Set to Breakthrough in 2020”] - Vogue India
Loma’s “Half Silences” is a sublime standout and visual from Don’t Shy Away, the group’s forthcoming album. Band member Jonathan Meiburg says of the track, “‘Half Silences’ was the first song we recorded for Don’t Shy Away, and we kept tinkering with it after we soft-released an early version last year. When you start making a record, you don’t know which songs will make the cut—but this one always seemed to belong, and we wanted to give the final mix (and its DIY video) a proper debut. People have asked if the fireworks are CGI. They aren’t.”
PASTE calls “Half Silences” “hushed and hypnotic,” and Gorilla vs Bear notes the song’s “haunting” vibe. Meanwhile, Clash Magazine says of the track, “‘Half Silences’ has a slightly more raw, visceral feel to their debut, its jagged guitar lines underpinning those fine vocal performances. Nuanced and mature, it’s the sound of those musicians further strengthening their bonds, while exploring fresh territory.”
Don’t Shy Away will be available on CD/LP/CS/DL October 23rd, 2020 on Sub Pop. The eleven-track effort featuring “Ocotillo,” the aforementioned “Half Silences,” ”Elliptical Days,” “Homing” and the title track, was produced and recorded by the band at Dandysounds in Dripping Strings, Texas—with the exception of “Homing,” which was produced by Brian Eno.
Late last month, Loma released the equally stunning Don’t Shy Away track “Ocotillo” to rave reviews. Stereogum calls the song “A languid and lovely piece of music that slowly builds up into widescreen catharsis. Cross’ powerful, crystalline lead vocal is a thing to behold.” Brooklyn Vegan offered this, “The gorgeously widescreen ‘Ocotillo’ that sounds as open as the Texas plain.” Beats Per Minute had this say, “Before long, the first tastes of woodwind appear, and from there Loma keep “Ocotillo” continually growing, oozing beauty and pomp as they subtly add in more layers. Cross’ vocals are heaven-sent, looking out over the vast plains created by the band, and together with her we sail through it, soon finding ourselves in thickets of wild and noisy brass and strings – utterly engrossed and captivated.” And For the Rabbits raved, “[‘Ocotillo’] is instantly intriguing, the band continuing their collaborative approach to writing, and shaping their creativity into something that’s both dense and dextrous; even as it gets loud and jarring it always seems to maintain it’s propulsion, always flowing, always moving, never standing still. The return of Loma feels like a second chance, a band who could so easily have slipped between the cracks, returning to give us the chance to make them realise just how loved they are, cherish their return, it’s a triumph.”
SUGAREGG, the incredible new album from Bully is now available for the world to hear through Sub Pop. The critically acclaimed album has been receiving accolades from such places as The New York Times, Alternative Press, Nashville Scene, Spin, RollingStone, Stereogum (Album of the Week), Bandcamp (Album of the day), DIY, and The Guardian to name a few. Bully mastermind Alicia Bognanno also recently recorded radio sessions with KEXP in Seattle, WA, and The Current in Minneapolis.
SUGAREGG is available worldwide now through Sub Pop. LP orders through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will receive the limited Loser edition on a translucent blue w/white “smoke” colored vinyl while supplies last. Meanwhile, preorders in the U.K. and Europe through select independent retailers will receive the Loser edition on transparent red vinyl. There is also a new t-shirt design.
SUGAREGG, was produced and mixed by John Congleton and Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, with additional production and mixing by Graham Walsh, recorded at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and Palace Sound in Toronto, Ontario, and mastered by Heba Kadry.
The record flows, hitting knee-skinning highs like “Stuck in Your Head” (“I just wanted to pick up the tempo!” Bognanno sing-songs as the band counts off), barn-burners like “You” (about, it seems, an absent parent) and the hauntingly discordant “Hours and Hours.” Whatever the subject matter, whatever the tempo, each track finds Bognanno full-throated, wild and free…their most self-assured album yet. [SUGAREGG/ 4.5 stars] - Rolling Stone
“‘SUGAREGG’ shows a musician at the top of their game, unafraid to take themselves a little less seriously than before.” [SUGAREGG] The Forty Five
“It’s a product full of joy, not maddening, but genuinely uplifting and encouraging. It’s also the best thing Bognanno has written. As the public is becoming increasingly accustomed to performances composed of lies and consistent sleight of hand, it’s rewarding to see someone go in the opposite direction and peel back the layers, revealing a freer and more transparent artistic self. It clearly hasn’t been easy, but on this basis, it certainly seems worth it.” The Line Of Best Fit
“The most explosive collection of songs from Bognanno’s discography.” [SUGAREGG] - Under the Radar
“…The songs on SUGAREGG feel like the singer, songwriter, guitarist, engineer and producer has reached a new level of comfort in her relationship with herself.” [SUGAREGG] - Nashville Scene
“This is joyous bubblegum grunge…Alicia Bognanno’s voice is as mesmeric and feral as ever, and her band sound simply, effortlessly, gigantic…you’re going to be rotting your teeth on SUGAREGG for weeks.” [SUGAREGG, ★★★★] - NARC
Today METZ shared the video for the second single off Atlas Vending, “Hail Taxi.” If METZ’s current mission is to mirror the inevitable struggles of adulthood, they’ve successfully managed to tap into the conflicted relationship between rebellion and revelry with the song’s tactics of offsetting their signature bombast with anthemic melodic resolutions. “‘Hail Taxi’ is about looking back. The lyrics deal with the idea of reconciling or coming to terms with who you were and who you’ve become,” shares frontman Alex Edkins. The stunning video, directed by A.F. Cortes, heightens these themes and expertly captures the same intensity as the alternately brutal verses and beguiling choruses of “Hail Taxi.” Of the video, Cortes says, “I wanted to tell a simple story that captures the song’s overarching theme. The idea of longing for the past creates many visual motifs and I wanted to create a piece that feels timeless and conveys a sense of isolation, highlighting that while we can hide our feelings, we can’t run from them.”
Atlas Vending, the band’s most dynamic, dimensional, and compelling work of their career will be released on October 9th. Bolstered by the co-production of Ben Greenberg (Uniform) and the engineering and mixing skills of Seth Manchester (Daughters, Lingua Ignota, The Body) at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Atlas Vending, the band’s fourth full-length album, sounds massive, articulate, and earnest.
Vinyl preorders in the UK and Europe from select independent retailers will receive the Loser Edition on light rose colored vinyl. A new t-shirt design is available as well. And in Canada, Atlas Vending will be available from Royal Mountain Records.
Father John Misty’s“To S.” b/w “To R.” is the singer’s double A-side contribution to Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 5, and his first new, original, studio material since his acclaimed 4th album, 2018’s God’s Favorite Customer. These gorgeous, meticulously rendered tunes were recorded at Fivestar Studios and Funky Monkey Soundhaus NoHo in Los Angeles, produced by Dave Cerminara and The Haxan Cloak, mixed by Cerminara, and mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering.
“To S.” and “To R.” follows Father John Misty’s Off-Key In Hamburg, his first live album, released in March of 2020, and Anthem +3, a collection of covers of songs by Leonard Cohen, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, and Link Wray was released July 2020. Combined, Off-Key In Hamburg and Anthem +3 raised over $100,000 for multiple causes including The Recording Academy’s MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund, CARE Action and Ground Game LA. Father John Misty is also selling his infamous “Poem Zone” t-shirt via his official webstore, with August proceeds from the store benefitting his touring crew.
Moor Mother’s contribution to the Sub Pop Singles Club Vol. 5 is Forever Industries, two phenomenal, atmospheric tracks of jazz-tinged experimental hip-hop recorded in early 2020. The songs speak about the temporal domain known as the future, making space, outer space, and industry. The A side is produced by Olof Melander, and the B side is produced by frequent Moor Mother collaborator Mental Jewelry; both tracks were recorded by Moor Mother in her home studio in North Philadelphia.
Moor Mother – aka Camae Ayewa – is a touring musician, poet, and visual artist based in Philadelphia. Over the past four years, Moor Mother released two acclaimed albums, 2016’s Fetish Bones, and 2019’s powerhouse of liberation-minded punk/hip-hop/electronic energy, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes. Moor Mother has toured throughout the world and performed live with Nicole Mitchell, Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Bug, and Justin Broadrick, to name a few. As a visual and soundscape artist, her work has been presented at The Kitchen NYC, Metropolitan Museum of Art Chicago, Guggenheim, and the Hirshhorn Gallery. She is the co-founder of Rockers! Philly, an event series and festival focused on marginalized artists, and Black Quantum Futurism Collective, a literary and artistic collaboration with Rasheedah Phillips. In addition to her solo work as Moor Mother, Ayewa is a vocalist and collaborator in Irreversible Entanglements, 700 Bliss (with DJ Haram), Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Moor/Jewelry (with Mental Jewelry).
