Way back when, before the algorithms, before the playlists and the socials, underground hip-hop lived by an unwritten code. Rappers didn't ask for their flowers. They took them. And just as every state has had its shine in this comeback wave, whether Buffalo and Upstate or Boston - their champions didn't request the culture's respect, they just grabbed it, forging their own legacies. It's Jersey's time now surely.

This album is a throwback to some of the rawest hip-hop you heard and the title says it all, the way a great album title used to - it sets the scene before you've even dropped the needle.

Chase Fetti needs no introduction, a mainstay of the scene for years now. Out of Cliffwood, New Jersey, Chase is an original A$AP affiliate who cut his teeth watching Rocky, Ferg, and the Mob's earliest Harlem basement sessions. A man who has since carved his own lane, building Mandatory Respect Ent. from the ground up and earning co-signs from the highest echelons of the East Coast underground — Westside Gunn, 38 Spesh, Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine, including an epic contribution to WSG's HWH10 alongside Flee Lord, and numerous appearances alongside Benny's Black Soprano Family.

Meanwhile this is our second release featuring fellow Jersey spitter Fli Fetti, whose catalog — the Heavy in the Trap series, Lord Fetti, Return of El Russo, a steady string of freestyles — speaks for itself. He is a writer's writer: punchline-dense, but never cluttered.

Together, Chase and Fli operate with the locked-in symmetry of a duo who have spent serious hours in the studio, smoking the same air, chasing the same take, as completely freestyled track "Off Top" (!) proves.

The production is a clinic in how to make a boom-bap record sound brand new without ever disrespecting the blueprint. DoughOnTheBeat handles the title track and sets the tone — wobbly keys, a drum pattern that sits somewhere between DJ Premier and the sound a busted washing machine makes at 3 a.m., in the best way. LetsGoHayes comes through twice, with the immaculate "Worker and a Boss" and the creeping "Spooky". godBLESSbeatz brings the cinematic dread to "Mando Mafia." Snubb, who has become something like the in-house architect of the MRE sound, handles "Anything Goes" and "Off Top". Bah Label scores the Lukey Cage interlude like a man scoring a late-night crime drama, and finally Harlem Zone & Nyckles close the record with "One of Us," which lands like a verdict.

A testament to quality hip-hop in 2026.

Side A

Available in 2 Editions:

VINYL Editions    -    Shipping 5th September

• Gold OBI / Black Vinyl
• Black Vinyl

Super Jewel Compact Disc    -    In hand

This listing is for the Vinyl Editions.

MDF2619