Killer Mike and El-P talk new Run The Jewels album: “We’re just rapping our asses off”

This morning (24th October) Run the Jewels - aka El-P and Killer Mike - unexpectedly released their second collaborative album, ‘RTJ2’. Originally scheduled for a 27th October release via Mass Appeal, the record’s available now for free via the Run the Jewels site.

“This record does have a bit more of a ‘Fight The Power’ feel to it,” says El-P in the new issue of DIY, perhaps taking cues from his long-time pal Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, who guests on the album.

“When you have just two regular dudes saying ‘fuck you’ to the most powerful things that we know, it’s not like we know we can do something about it, it’s just ‘Fuck you, OK. You might be the most powerful thing in the world, but hey, suck my dick, how about that?’

“There’s something powerful about that, you know. If you walk up to a king and say ‘Suck my dick, King’, and he beheads you? You still said ‘Suck my dick.’ And even in just saying that, you are reducing the power of the person in front of you.”

El-P reveals ‘Angel Dust’ to be the album’s killer anthem, apparently scrutinising the divergence between the existence of God and that of the church, as well as “the control system that is instated and that has been projected onto our world through that sort of façade, through the manipulation of man under the guise of holiness.”

Mainly, though, Killer Mike is keen to emphasise, they’re just “rapping [their] asses off.”

Read the full interview in the November issue of DIY, out Friday 31st October. Run The Jewels’ new album ‘RTJ2’ is out now via Mass Appeal.