After their 2014 triumph of the spacy, ghostly Lese Majesty, Seattle experimental hip-hop duo and 2010 Genius Award winners Shabazz Palaces have announced their new album, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star (Sub Pop, out July 14). And judging from the latest song off the LP, "Shine a Light," it’s going to be amazing.
As usual, the album will feature a host of collaborators, including The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Thundercat, Gamble and Huff, Darrius Willrich, Loud Eyes Lou, Ahmir, Jon Kirby, Sunny Levine, and local funk MC Thaddillac, featured here in the lyric video for "Shine a Light”:
According to a statement by the group, Born on A Gangster Star “came into the world in a big damn hurry, like nightfall on an island,” and was recorded in two weeks with producer Erik Blood. “New gear and new equipment disintegrated comfort zones into dust and a new path appeared in the rubble.”
Best yet, Ishmael Butler has brought his alter-ego, the Palaceer, back to tell the tale of their third album, bringing visions of Sun-Ra to mind:
Herein the Palaceer continues the tale of Quazars, a sentient being from somewhere else, an observer sent here to Amurderca to chronicle and explore as a musical emissary. What he finds in our world is a cutthroat place, a landscape where someone like him could never quite feel comfortable amidst all the brutality and alternative facts and death masquerading as connectivity.
Inspired by days on end spent in the waves—water and light, both—of Southern California, the work came to the Palaceer in a flash, like being picked up by something and carried. Always dribbling with his head up, he can see what’s going on around him and react to it, rather than starting in a certain direction and hoping to achieve something upon arrival.
What’s good?—the kids ask. What does it even mean, and what does it even matter? Who is behind these choices? We are all of us sitting under a waterfall of all. this. shit. But it’s the excess that is casting us into ruts.
“Born on a Gangster Star,” the statement promises, “flirts with a pop sensibility, but through the prism of Shabazz Palaces’s fire and fury.”
We can’t wait.
Shabazz Palaces will also be heading out on tour this summer, and their first (and only) Seattle stop is at Upstream May 13.