AOTY #8: Bun B & Statik Selektah - TrillStatik [2019]

Welcome to my Album of the Year highlights! I’ll give you a little run down with a brief history to start, show you the tracklist (with the tracks in bold being my favorites) with all of the featured guests (if any), give you some descriptors that might make you more inclined to check it out (if my recommendation isn’t ain’t for you), and I’ll provide links to stream/buy the project down at the bottom. Enjoy!

Recorded in a 24-hours livestreamed session, TrillStatik was a phenomena that many artists (as evidenced by the absolutely stacked feature list) saw as an important cultural event. It was a marriage of old school New York DJs and Texas Trillmasters that saw the best being brought out of everyone invloved. The beats here are some of the best Statik Selektah has done in a while, all of the guests kill their verses and hooks, and Bun B himself, while being on a much lower proportion of the record due to the features, shows himself every bit as a aggressive and sharp as he’s always been. TrillStatik, probably more than any other records you’ll see this year, shows the results of a group of dedicated artists getting together on a large scale to create art; it’s inspirational.

Tracklist

1. Moving Mountains (Feat. Javante)

2. Still Trill (Feat. Method Man & Grafh)

3. Basquiat (Feat. Fat Joe & Smoke DZA)

4. Concrete (Feat. Westside Gunn & Termanology)

5. Money (Feat. Lil Fame & Wais P)

6. Superstar (Feat. Meechy Darko, CJ Fly, & Haile Supreme)

7. Paperwork (Feat. Uncle Murda)

8. TBA (Feat. Propain & Killa Kyleon)

9. Time Flies (Feat. Big K.R.I.T. & Talib Kweli)

10. I Know (Feat. Haile Supreme)

11. All Good (Feat. Tobe Nwigwe)

12. Jon Snow (Feat. Paul Wall & Le$)

13. Lemons

14. How the Game Go

Bun B (Left), who with Pimp C formed the legendary duo UGK, and Statik Selektah (Right), a long-standing New York DJ, fuse Northeastern jazz-rap/boom-bap sensibilities with hard-nosed H-Town slang. This was only the first of three collaboration albums for Statik this year, with albums with Curren$y and Paul Wall coming later in the year.

Recommended if you like:

Old school soul samples, A Tribe Called Quest, smooth jazz, Paul Wall, sampled-based hip-hop, UGK, DJ scratching, Pro Era, 90’s Golden Age hip-hop, Joey Bada$$, an ass-ton of features

Here’s my original write-up of TrillStatik:

April 2019

↓ Listen to TrillStatik ↓

Spotify/YouTube/Apple Music