LISTEN: Four Tet & Madlib Team Up On 'Hopprock'
Two industry spearheads join forces, and the result is truly magical…
I’m a sucker for a good collaboration. And this latest one is a little too good to be true. A little background information: Madlib is widely considered one of the most prolific and influential figures within the history of West Coast hip hop. Four Tet is considered one of electronic music’s most renowned, versatile, and respected creatives. Just imagining the calibre of their creative love child feels a bit like when you’re at a restaurant, and you’re absolutely starving, and you’ve been waiting for ages for your food, and then you see the waiter walking over with your food and you could genuinely cry with the anticipation. And you take that first bite, and you don’t think you’ve ever been this happy. This is exactly like that.
Making the absolute most of life in isolation, this project comes fresh off the coattails of Four Tet already releasing 3 albums in 2020: Sixteen oceans, Parallel, and 871. Madlib’s latest release comes in the form of his 2019 album Bandana, a strong addition to a discography which has seen him collaborate with the likes of Freddie Gibbs, Jay Dilla, Talib Kweli and MF DOOM.
Announcing their imminent debut album together back in December, the pair have allegedly been working on this project for years. Titled Sound Ancestors and scheduled for release in January via Madlib Invazion, the pair have released their latest track ‘Hopprock’, as a tasty teaser for the album.
Featuring the slouchy punching drums that you’d come to expect from a Madlib track, the space that would usually be filled with the rappers own vocals have been delicately littered with reverberated vocal samples, and soft instrumentation synonymous with Four Tet. Dipping and swelling somewhere between ambient experimentalism, hip hop, and funk, ‘Hopprock’ perfectly encapsulates the strengths of both Madlib and Four Tet in a symbiotic way. The 3-minute and 27-second track sounds like it belongs in the soundtrack to Oceans Eleven, Killing Eve, or any other sexy mysterious thriller type scenario. Dig in, and get ready for the album’s full release later this month.