Following up from the sick Black Milk produced ‘Won’t End Well’ surfacing 8 days before… Children of Zeus only went and dropped a full free album down the UK’s chimney on Christmas Eve!
As Christmas presents go, CoZ’s thank you to their supporters is a doozie. Especially as the outfit have had a year that’s seen them raise their profile considerably (and therefore a dope full album from them presumably has a pretty high potential value to it), choosing to gift it to fans is bare generous.
The Winter Tape is a thing of beauty. Whether its been made up of unreleased material they had lying around or was intentionally created as an album isn’t obvious at all. This shit has the feel of a complete, considered project. Fitting with its title, the LP sounds out a soulful serenade for a season of long dark nights on cold streets. There’s something about the whole project (similarly to ‘Won’t End Well’) that seems to set those streets somewhere stateside at some point in the 90s. Production throughout evokes the golden era. Throw in the mix of hard flows from Konny Kon and Tyler Daley with abundant, classicly RnB sounding hooks from Tyler and it all combines to set the sound of the LP somewhere way back and far away.
The Winter Tape is beyond ill. Which raises the question, if this is the shit that CoZ have up their sleeves to give away free at the second, what manner of next level juju have they presumably got saved for a commercial release in 2019??
No doubt big things on the way next year. You can download The Winter Tape for free here.