Nearly three decades after forging one of underground hip-hop’s most enduring creative partnerships and five years on from their celebrated collaborative full length Garbology, lauded MC Aesop Rock and prolific producer Blockhead reunite for Trouble Mountain, which is a new full-length meditation on escape, survival and the strange terrain of everyday life. The album takes its inspiration from the Poconos resort commercials that blanketed New York airwaves during the pair’s childhoods: idyllic promises of relaxation, reinvention and escape that lingered long after the commercials ended.
Trouble Mountain marks Aesop Rock’s 13th studio album, and finds one of hip-hop’s most distinctive writers operating at full capacity. Across the record, he transforms family history, work, memory, and the absurd mechanics of modern life into vivid, deeply human reflections. Blockhead‘s production is equally vital, pairing the duo’s unmistakable chemistry with lean, evolving soundscapes that feel both familiar and newly exploratory.
Trouble Mountain turns that familiar fantasy into a fictional destination of its own, where the search for a better life proves every bit as strange, complicated, and disorienting as the one patrons left behind. The album’s theme finds a potent visual manifestation in the video for the aptly titled track “Trouble Trouble,” animated by longtime visual collaborator Justin “Coro” Kaufman, in which a skier at the fictional resort finds themselves in increasingly fraught and surrealistic circumstances.
Trouble Mountain Track List
1. Swedish Death Cleaning
2. Coyote Summer (feat. Hanni El Khatib)
3. Church Key
4. Easter
5. Hound Selector
6. TM Tours (feat. Baby Dayliner)
7. Trouble Trouble
8. Mom One
9. One Thing (feat. Open Mike Eagle)
10. Ants
11. Oatmeal
12. No Interviews
13. The Bag
14. Eat And Grow (feat. Cavalier and 4-IZE)
15. Ewok
16. High and Outside
17. Buffering
Photo Credit: Brett Padelford
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