Simplicity is genius. Great artists can make the ostensibly impossible seem effortless. It’s in this rarefied air where you’ll find Detroit’s Apollo Brown, constantly conjuring fresh innovations out of a tried-and-true formula. For the last decade, the Mello Music Group artist has singularly re-defined and expanded the foundation of what boom bap production can sound like in the 21st Century.
This is the tradition that Apollo Brown triumphantly upholds: the head-nodding, screwface-inducing, soul-replenishing lineage of Preemo and Pete Rock, J Dilla and Large Professor, Mobb Deep and DJ Muggs. He makes music for old and young heads—bone bruising beats that summon visceral images of back alley brawls in ’81, pool hall melees, and metropolitan griminess. An East Coast sound with a midwestern mentality, channelling the marrow-freezing chill of the wind fleeing Lake Michigan.
