Ritual

Producer The Expert fuses elements from jazz and 60s-era psychedelic music on Ritual. Combine that with emcee Stik Figa at his most honest and personal, and you have the recipe for a must-cop. The tracklist already sets the tone for what to expect with guest spots by Blu, Solemn Brigham (of Marlowe), Defcee, Sleep Sinatra, Tanya Morgan, and Daniel Luke. Hip-hop heads who have heard last year’s psychedelic hip-hop opus ‘The Overview Effect’ by The Expert together with emcee Jermiside, already know they’re in for a trip. Stik Figa has a good ear for beats. His releases include early work with Oddisee, the collaborative album ‘The City Under The City’ with L’Orange, last year’s ‘Valley of Dry Bones’ with Griselda’s Conductor Williams, and several releases on Mello Music Group with production work by Apollo Brown, Black Milk, and Exile, among others. Now, with The Expert, Stik Figa finds himself in a sonic pastiche. Layers upon layers of Mellotron chords, vibraphone melodies, guitar stabs, and swirling strings tumble over each other. All for hard-hitting beats that defy the golden-era boom-bap rulebook. Stik Figa, on his turn, moves with ease from dead honest observations to showing lyrical dexterity and skill, to expressing inner struggles. All of that makes Ritual a head-nodding, mind-blowing body of work. The way jazz influences collide with psychedelic production pushes both the Dublin, Ireland-based producer and the Topeka, Kansas native emcee into new hip-hop territory.