Listen: New Run the Jewels track “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)”
Run the Jewels — the duo of Killer Mike and El-P — have been on a hot streak leading up to the release of Run the Jewels 2, the follow-up to their incredible self-titled first full length from 2013. First they released “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1,” and then announced a campaign to release an all-cat version of the album called Meow the Jewels. And today, they dropped another explosive new jam from their upcoming album, titled “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)”, which features an appearance by Rage Against the Machine vocalist Zack de La Rocha. The album premiered this morning via Buzzfeed, and you can listen to this beast of a track below. Or, if you prefer, you can bump this shit like they do in the future.
El-P apparently has some unreleased work with De La Rocha that he’s been sitting on. “We worked on music together in the late ’90s after Rage broke up but it never came out,” he tells Buzzfeed. “We remained friends, though, and when I was in L.A. working on the record I bumped in to him literally on the way to the studio. He came by and listened to what we had and a day later was recording with us.” Sounds like it could be a pretty interesting collaboration, should it ever see the light of day.
Run the Jewels 2 is out on Oct. 28 via Mass Appeal.
Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.