El-P
El-P Looks Back at 20 Years of Fantastic Damage
There’s an accidental symmetry to El-P’s first three albums. He didn’t necessarily map it out that way, but each of his three records was released five years apart, making 2022 a year of noteworthy anniversaries: Cancer 4 Cure is 10 this month, its predecessor I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead turned 15 in March, and his debut, Fantastic Damage, is 20. In looking back, El-P can’t help but appreciate the parallels in hindsight. “It’s only cool 20 years later,” the rapper/producer tells SPIN with both amusement and exasperation over the phone from his New York City home. “At the time it was like, ‘Why does it take five years to put an album out?!’” Born Jaime Meline, El-P has spent the past decade as half of the bombastic Run the Jewels, trading verses with his longtime friend and creative partner...
Watch Run the Jewels Lead an Action Figure Rebellion in New Video for ‘Walking in the Snow’
Run the Jewels are capping off their big year in style with their new music video for “Walking in the Snow.” After ending up on virtually everyone’s album/song/artist of the year lists (including being named SPIN’s Artist of the Year) for RTJ4, Killer Mike and El-P had one more gift to fans in their Santa-sized sacks. The new video is directed by Chris Hopewell, whose previous work includes the duo’s “Don’t Get Captured,” and transforms the rappers into action figures for a stop motion masterpiece. Much like their living counterparts, the toys spend the bulk of the video taking on an authoritarian figure and leading a revolution. “It was great to work with the RTJ guys again,” Hopewell said in a statement. “Everyone was very aware of the gravity of the subject matter and RTJ didn’t wa...
Artist of the Year: Run the Jewels
In a year filled with chaos, social reckoning, protests, rage and financial ruin, there appeared to be no light that would save the world from the roiling political issues that had been brewing for decades. There was no Death Star, though it would have surprised no one if the Earth imploded like Alderaan. At least we had the two heroes we definitely needed but didn’t deserve: Run the Jewels. In February, El-P and Killer Mike were gearing up for what was set to be the biggest year of their career. Run the Jewels had become a tour de force with each of their studio albums (and of course, the cat-themed remix album Meow the Jewels), and opening for Rage Against the Machine on the band’s latest reunion tour would have opened up the duo to a much wider audience. Then, March 2020 happened. The p...
El-P, Charli XCX, Lizzo and More Are in the Halloween Spirit
It really is cruel that Halloween is on a Saturday this year — between the pandemic and looming election, it’s hard to let loose and celebrate much of anything right now — but that doesn’t mean you can’t dress up, even if your costume party is hosted by Zoom. Run The Jewels’ El-P and his wife Emily Panic paid tribute to The Sopranos by dressing up as Tony and Carmela Soprano. Charli XCX got ghoulish with red latex and a creepy monster sleeve. Halsey, the queen of Halloween, went all out on a Corpse Bride costume, while YUNGBLUD dressed up in two different costumes (Wednesday Addams and Beetlejuice). But Lizzo might have taken the cake this year — she dressed up as 2020’s hero, the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head during the vice presidential debate. See all these and more cos...
Run the Jewels to Perform RTJ4 on First-Ever Adult Swim Music Broadcast
Run the Jewels want you to vote. And they’re about to make history to make it happen. On Monday, Killer Mike and El-P announced that their critically acclaimed rap group will put on Adult Swim’s first-ever musical broadcast as they perform their new record RTJ4. The “Holy Calamavote” performance — brought together by Adult Swim and Ben & Jerry’s — will see the duo run through the entirety of the record on Oct. 10 at 12 a.m. “We’re proud to be a part of this initiative to encourage and enable voting and can’t wait to finally perform our album RTJ4. This will be fun,” the pair said in a joint statement. The main goal of the performance isn’t to necessarily share the tracks live for the first time, it’s to get fans to cast ballots on Nov. 3. “Adult Swim is honored to be a p...
Ben Gibbard, Laura Jane Grace, El-P, Others to Help Save Stereogum With Cover Songs
Ben Gibbard, Laura Jane Grace, and El-P are among the artists contributing to a new compilation called Save Stereogum: An ‘00s Covers Comp, which, as the title implies, is a a fundraiser to help the long-beloved online publication, which went full independent earlier this year, stay up and running. The list of musicians contributing covers of songs from 2000 to 2009 is staggering: The National, Dirty Projectors, Car Seat Headrest, Soccer Mommy, Sharon Van Etten. Ty Segall, Hamilton Leithauser and Mac DeMarco among others. You can find the list all 44 contributing artists here. The choices of songs being covered will be “a surprise.” (Also, check out their amazing t-shirts for sale, which parody the Stooges, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, and others.) “We knew building a sustainable operatio...
Run the Jewels’ RTJ4 Is Driving Music for a Cop Car on Fire
Run the Jewels don’t make a reviewer’s job easy because everything that’s great about them is the stuff we’re supposed to ignore to get to the bottom of the hype. They began as the best kind of “supergroup”: An unlikely pairing of beloved talents who still had plenty of room to peak higher. El-P’s fantastic Fantastic Damage and his countless innovative productions for his own previous, self-built Def Jux universe (Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Mr. Lif’s I Phantom) were unmistakably the most futuristic squelches in dusty-crate-obsessed indie-rap. Jaime Meline set the stage for dystopian soundscapes in hip-hop more than a decade before Death Grips, Yeezus, or the “mutant” scene that’s spawned Black Dresses and Deli Girls. Then you’ve got Michael Render, d/b/a Killer Mike, a firebrand of an MC...
Run the Jewels Share Powerful ‘A Few Words For The Firing Squad (Radiation)’
Following Killer Mike’s impassioned speech and offering up their upcoming album, RTJ4, for free to anyone who needs it, El-P shared Run The Jewel’s album closer, “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation).” The beats roll in and grow as the hip-hop duo get on the mic. “When they got you you feeling like a fox running from another pack a dogs/ Put the pistol and the fist up in the air, we are there, swear to God,” El-P delivers. Meanwhile, Killer Mike’s bars build with intensity as a saxophone comes in. “This is for the do-gooders that the no-gooders, used and then abused/ For the truth-tellers tied to the whipping post, left beaten, battered, bruised/ For the ones whose body hung from a tree like a piece of strange fruit/ Go hard, last words to the firing squad was, “Fuck you too,’...
