Animals (LP)

Kassa Overall is a welcome addition to the forward thinking Warp Records roster looking to take things even further. With an impressive list of collaborators and credits under his belt, the NYC by way of Seattle artist merges jazz, beats, rap, and his virtuosic drumming, getting personal and even more irreverent of genres on his third album Animals.

His first two studio albums, GO GET ICE CREAM AND LISTEN TO JAZZ and I THINK I'M GOOD, saw Kassa layering virtuosic drumming, meticulous production techniques, and incisive lyricism to establish himself as a rhythmic innovator and visionary poet, using his voice to address the injustices of the carceral system, the pharmaceutical industry, and anti-black racism, while wrangling with the perils of his own mental illness.

On Animals, his Warp Records debut, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album's diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.

The title Animals serves as a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. Animals is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one's natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one's freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.