DJ Shadow - Nobody Speak (ft. Run the Jewels)

El-P and DJ Shadow have been pals for twenty years, so really, it was only a matter of time before a darkness drenched hook-up. Squelching brass licks, and twanging Blues riffs that tumble down the scales into Run the Jewels’ customary comic darkness. Within bars, El’s referring to himself as a “bag of dicks,” and threatening to “punch a baby bear in his shit,” and Killer Mike is just as whip-smart. Making digs at Donald Trump’s incredibly uncomfortable comments about his own family members, and advising everyone in his path to flee and start “pumping their bunions, ‘Nobody Speak’ is a carefully paced, impact-precision onslaught of misleadingly puerile, deceptively unsavoury images.

Dreaming of blazing up a cheeky doobie with the cartoon cast of Snoopy, and flaming-throwing “function to Funyuns” (an onion-flavored corn snack, fyi) in the same breath, there’s an underlying violence – and ever-present political agenda – to Run the Jewels and DJ Shadow’s latest. El-P raps about shooting a baby duck dead for the crime of quacking, with a gun bought from Ruger. “Nobody speak, nobody get choked,” warns the chorus, ominously. Run the Jewels’ violence here might be comic, and overblown slapstick, but they’re characteristically digging at a true American reality. In a country where a toupee-wearing hate-mongerer has a shot at presidency, and police brutality takes away black lives every day for crimes like walking through the wrong neighbourhood with a pocket full of jelly beans, ‘Nobody Speak’ is anything but a joke.