Ratking – 700-Fill EP (WEB) (2015) (320 kbps)

Experimental hip-hop trio Ratking dropped a surprise EP called 700 Fill today via the even more surprising conduit of BitTorrent. The number of Brooklyn millenials who install BitTorrent today will probably be close to the company’s current user base. It’s not No Love Deep Web, but for musicians to willingly work with a torrent client is a subversive act in itself, and I love how tongue-in-cheek it is. Composed of rappers Wiki (Patrick Morales), Hak (Hakeem Lewis) and producer Sporting Life (Eric Adiele), Ratking’s debut album So It Goes came out last year via XL’s imprint Hot Charity. 700 Fill is the follow-up, and it features Remy Banks of World’s Fair, the anime-mystic female rapper Princess Nokia, Despot, Slickyboy, and Teddy.

Along with nine new songs and instrumentals, the trio included a video by Ari Marcopoulos called “700 Drop” in the free bundle. In case you were wondering what 700 Fill means, it refers to a type of North Face jacket, specifically the amount of goose down included. Listen to the beginning of album opener “American Gods” and the end of track six “Lenape Lane” to catch shout outs to the tape’s name, and “Steep Tech” for yet another meditation on the importance of jacket types. Given the eternal winter New York has been draped in, Ratking’s fixation on outerwear couldn’t feel more timely; it’s also a jump from the morbid Kurt Vonnegut allusion of their last release’s title.

Of course, 700 Fill mostly concerns itself with NYC, and the beats are woozy, chilling skeletons that occasionally gobble up jazzy brass or the twinkling synthesizers that Sporting Life seems to prefer. Wiki and Hak rap with just as much alacrity and acidic quickness as they did on So It Goes, cementing their place as leaders of New York’s next generation of rap.

Tracklist:

01: American Gods [Featuring Remy Banks, Teddy & Slickyboy]
02: Arnold Palmer
03: Bethel
04: Eternal Reveal
05: Flurry
06: Lenape Lane [Featuring Slickyboy]
07: Steep Tech [Featuring Despot & Princess Nokia]
08: Sticky Trap
09: Makeitwork

Download:

320 kbps – Wayshare