Album Review: Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels

Run The Jewels is the new project from ex-Company Flow producer/rapper extraordinaire El-P and rapper Killer Mike, the men responsible for highly lauded 2012 albums Cancer For Cure and R.A.P Music respectively. Anyone who caught them at Laneway Festival knows how these boys do – razor-sharp rhymes, innate scintillating production and some of the darkest and funniest shit this side of Kanye's wet dreams.

Guest spots by Big Boi and Prince Paul as his Handsome Boy Modelling School alter-ego Chest Rockwell are largely superfluous and in Paul's case slightly irritating – this is El and Mike's show and they're in blistering form. DDFH seethes with sludgy synth dirges that lead into Mike's refrain of “Do dope fuck hope” after tales of police brutality and a surveillance-obsessed city gone mad. Super Mario bonus sounds litter 36 Chain, while No Come Down has to be the best song ever written about a lapdance on mushrooms, “psilocybin, got me slidin'”, a masterful track that contains funk guitar flourishes along with a beat-drop accompanied by Mike's mantra “And I won't come down…”. It all ends up with immaculately-titled closer A Christmas Fucking Miracle, starting off like Lauryn Hill's Doo Wop (That Thing) before 808'ing DJ Shadow-style into a sonic stew of spacey guitar solos and choirs amongst the boasting verses.

This is thrilling stuff, as good as anything the genre has thrown up this year; two men at the height of their games taking full advantage of their collaborative power. It's also available as a free download just to top it off, complete with herb grinder merch from the website if that's what you're into.