With Run The Jewels 4 reportedly finished, it’s only natural that El-P and Killer Mike have begun fielding more and more questions about the album as its release date supposedly nears. That’s exactly what happened when El-P showed up as the latest guest on Vinyl Me Please‘s Good Convo podcast: Host Michael Penn II waited until just about the very end of the conversation and “shot his shot” to get a few nuggets of information about the upcoming album. His efforts were rewarded with one of the cooler hip-hop analogies in recent memory, as well as some info about the album’s length and guests.
https://soundcloud.com/vinylmeplease/good-convo-episode-7-el-p
In the final ten minutes of the interview above, El-P mentions that the fourth Run The Jewels album will be 11 tracks, 38 minutes long, and feature some “guest appearances that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, as well.” He doubles down on his assertion that it’s “hard as f*ck,” saying it’s “the hardest sh*t we’ve ever done — front to back, punch in the face. Absolute mayhem from the moment it starts.”
He then uses that cool hip-hop analogy as a way to explain the rationale behind wanting the album to be so good. “We set out to do at a bare minimum what EPMD did for us,” he says, referencing the Golden Era duo consisting of Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith (Making Dollars), who released four albums from 1988 to 1992 that helped define and refine the sound of the era. “They basically have a legendary run of four records… They had four back-to-back the hardest, funniest, dopest records. It’s very rare to get four… I’ll put it to you this way: This should be the record that Run The Jewels falls off. This is not the record that Run The Jewels falls off.”
Listen to the full Good Convo interview above and check out EPMD’s legendary catalog here.
