3. Aesop RockFloat

That album changed my life. I didn’t know you could rap like that. It is so lyric-dense, and so fun, and so moody and scary, and still funky, and so personal, but it still works at the party. But it’s just one of the most virtuosic displays of rapping, ever. His ability to take a still image or a small scene and fill that with beautiful descriptive language… Writing “six armour-clad black horse and buggy mechanisms” to describe police cars… It’s a very novelistic approach, and provides so much opportunity for rhythm, flow and cadence. I studied the hell out of that album, and everything else he ever released. I must have been 19 or 20 when I heard that record, and it changed everything. The world was bigger, like, “Oh, there’s more. You can do more. I did not know you could do that, and now I do.” The fact that he’s on [Dead Channel Sky], my 18-year-old self cries every day. He’s one of the artists who has become a collaborator and peer, who I can text, and that fact breaks my brain – that somebody that important to me artistically is someone I can actually talk to. That is still crazy to me.