Today, Atmosphere, the genre defining hip-hop duo of Slug & Ant, have announced their new album Jestures, due out September 19th via Rhymesayers Entertainment. Alongside the announcement they’ve shared singles “Velour” & “Really,” which comes paired with a music video directed by Melby. In the video, Slug pulls back the curtain on a series of dare devil stunts, landing somewhere between John Wick, The Rehearsal, and Jackass.
“We were having fun” shares Sean Daley aka Slug, “we didn’t want to stop. That’s how we ended up chasing this idea of making 26 songs, all the way from A to Z.”
“I was able to throw the kitchen sink at it more than I probably ever did, seriously every kind of style or anything I wanted,” adds Anthony Davis aka Ant, “It was super fun to be able to do any kind of style of music.”
A deluxe and standard vinyl, cassette, and limited merchandise are available for pre-order on atmospheresucks.com.
A little less than a quarter of the way through Jestures, Atmosphere’s sprawling, acrobatic new album, Slug cuts right to the beating heart of this phase in the legendary duo’s catalog: “Still get nightmares when you’re living your dreams,” he raps. The cliches about creativity say that it comes from chaos—the rock star archetypes forged in the 1970s conjure images of coke spoons and trashed hotel rooms, and more recent thinking makes it inextricable from major trauma. Jestures, which is already Atmosphere’s fifth release of the 2020s, challenges that notion. This remarkably productive period has seen Slug burrow into every crevice of middle-aged stability and domestic life for its unexpected points of friction. With Jestures, this exploration has yielded its most fascinating results to date.
The first thing you notice about Jestures is its shape. Not only does it feature an eye-popping 26 songs, but those songs are arranged alphabetically by their titles: “Asshole” into “Baby” into “Caddy,” and so on. Even the lineup of guests conforms to this, with Evidence on “Effortless,” Kurious on “Kilowatts,” and a trio of heavy hitters—Musab, Muja Messiah, and Mike the Martyr—on “Mash,” among others. Both the sequencing of tracks and their sheer number are bits of misdirection. Many songs on Jestures last just long enough to fully articulate their core ideas; the crop of 26 is arranged in such a way so as to be musically intuitive and a comprehensive survey of one man’s life as he pauses to take stock.
Jestures is an album not about being stuck, but about the relentless forward progress of time. “Don’t mistake my circle as the shape of repetition,” Slug raps on opener “Asshole,” underlining how central this pursuit has become. This manifests in the mundane—those rent or mortgage payments come no matter what’s happened in the 30 days since; the fridge needs to stay full—and when it comes to life’s bigger, more abstract anxieties. If, as he raps on “Daley,” Slug wants “to skip ahead to read the end of the story,” he’s out of luck.
What exists in place of that certainty that will never come is the joy of discovery. Little things you never noticed about your partner, tics your kids pick up when you aren’t looking. All of this is laid over a lush, varied set of beats from the illustrious Ant, ranging from the controlled electro-chaos of “Furthermore” to the heavy droning of “Past,” the playful drum cascade of “XXX” to the cowboy-outlaw twang of “Locusts.” Early on the title track, Slug quips that while he has both an angel and a devil on his shoulders, “all they really want is exposure.” It’s funny, but it’s also the core ethos of Jestures. On a long enough timeline, all the overdue credit card bills or lovers’ quarrels simply become the things that shape you in the present—and point you, better prepared, toward the future.
Really and Velour are out now
Jestures is out Friday 19th September
For more information on Atmosphere:
5. Effortless (feat. Evidence)
8. Heavy Lifting (feat. Haphduzn)
11. Kilowatts (feat. Kurious)
13. Mash (feat. Mike the Martyr, Musab, Muja Messiah)
25. Yearning (feat. Yoni Wolf (of WHY?))
26. Zorro (feat. ZooDeVille)
Atmosphere will perform this weekend at the sold-out Vans Warped Tour in Long Beach, CA. Following this, they will join the Dank Daze of Summer tour on Friday, August 8 in St. Augustine, FL alongside Cypress Hill, Lupe Fiasco, and The Pharcyde. The tour includes a special hometown headline show, Atmosphere & Friends, at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand on August 23, concluding at the Reggae Rise Up Festival in Redmond, OR on August 30.
Atmosphere will close out the summer with a sold-out performance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, CO on Friday, September 19. This event coincides with the release of their new album, Jestures, and marks the group’s thirteenth headline performance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The show will feature special guests Hieroglyphics, Dilated Peoples, Living Legends, Immortal Technique, CunninLynguists, and DeejayBird.
See full tour dates below.
July 26th to July 27 – Long Beach, CA @ Warped Tour *
August 8th – St. Augustine, FL @ The Saint Augustine Amphitheatre +
August 9th – North Charleston, SC @ Firefly Distillery +
August 10th – Wilmington, NC @ Live Oak Bank Pavillion +
August 12th – Charlotte, NC @ The Amp Ballantyne +
August 13th – Virginia Beach, VA @ The Dome +
August 15th – Baltimore, MD @ Pier Six Pavillion +
August 16th – New Haven, CT @ Westville Music Bowl +
August 17th – Asbury Park, NJ @ Stone Pony Summer Stage +
August 19th – Lewiston, NY @ Artpark Amphitheatre +
August 20th – Cincinnati, OH @ Andrew J Brady Music Center +
August 22nd – Milwaukee, WI @ The Eagles Ballroom +
August 23rd – St. Paul, MN @ Minnesota State Fair Grandstand w/ Cypress Hill, Lupe Fiasco, The Pharcyde, DJ Abilities
August 24th – Council Bluffs, IA @ Harrah’s Stir Cove +
August 26th – Dillon, CO @ Dillon Amphitheater +
August 27th – Salt Lake City, UT @ Granary Live +
August 29th – Boise, ID @ Outlaw Field at the Idaho Botanical Garden +
August 30th – Redmond, OR @ Reggae Rise Up Oregon *
September 19th – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre w/ Hieroglyphics, Dilated Peoples, Living Legends, Immortal Technique, Cunninlynguists, DeeJayBird (SOLD OUT)
*Atmosphere Festival Performance
+ Dank Daze Of Summer Tour w/ Cypress Hill, Lupe Fiasco, The Pharcyde
For three decades now, Atmosphere has maintained a course of rigorous output, releasing over two dozen studio albums, EP’s and collaborative side projects in as many years. In that time, the venerated duo have built a legacy out of bringing honesty, humility and vulnerability to the forefront of their music, continually challenging themselves to evolve without straying too far from their roots. Slug has proven masterful at storytelling and writing compelling narratives, leaving a trail of his own influence while paying homage to the rappers and songwriters that helped shape him. Ant has skillfully molded the soundtracks with inspiration from soul, funk, rock, reggae, and the wizardry of hip-hop’s pioneering DJ’s and producers, creating his own trademark sounds while providing the pulse for songs about life, love, stress and setbacks. At its essence, Atmosphere has been a musical shepherd, and with each new album comes a new journey as they guide generations of listeners through this thing called life.
