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Shabazz Palaces exists at the point of sublimation. For the past 15 years, Ishmael Butler and his cast of collaborators have drifted further and further into the outer reaches, deconstructing and reassembling hip-hop, jazz, and kosmische conventions into sprawling, proggy rhapsodies. Their grip on song structure has loosened with each record and, by their most recent, 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, nearly dissipated altogether. Butler’s imperturbable, reverb-soaked raps can feel like communiques from some cosmic entity ruminating on our stardust origins and infinite potentialities. It’s a Style Sport, the latest Shabazz Palaces album, delivers plenty of that signature haze, but it plants one foot on solid ground, reaching through space and time without becoming completely untethered.
Over seven full-lengths, Butler has created a multi-volume instruction manual for transcendence. 2011’s Black Up, his first masterpiece outside Digable Planets, was a treatise on reinvention, a reminder that our eyes can adjust to darkness and find a path through it. For 2023’s Robed in Rareness, he enlisted a massive list of contributors, illustrating the power of community to realize a shared vision. It’s a Style Sport explores memory as a tool for analyzing the grand mysteries. He’s always harnessed the aesthetics and swagger of eras past—’80s electro drums pepper the Shabazz Palaces catalog—but here, Butler takes a pointed look at his personal history for inspiration, indexing what he’s learned and where it led him. It’s a record rooted in gratitude, a serious and smirking ode to resilience and curiosity.
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That turn inward makes It’s a Style Sport seem small and quiet at first, curling into itself rather than expanding. Longtime collaborator Erik Blood foregrounds Butler’s dry drum machines in the mix, letting every other element shuffle around them, snaking toward the spotlight for a brief moment and retreating back into the brume. Even Butler’s voice, typically the centerpiece of his songs, often sinks into the shadows, giving cuts like “Olivia According to Touch” and “Jheri Curl Jump” the hushed meandering of an inner monologue. It’s as though we’re viewing the record through a pinhole, aware that there’s a teeming universe just beyond our sightline. Turn the volume up and that pinhole dilates, revealing swirling galaxies of vocal harmonies, upright bass plucks, and cascading piano runs.
To craft these subtle symphonies, Butler gathered members of the Shabazz and Digable Planets live bands at Seattle’s Hall of Justice studio, giving the players bare-bones song ideas to jam to until they gelled. The ensemble pulls off a neat trick: Noticing certain details, like the acoustic drums that come in halfway through opener “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet),” or the synth line that mirrors the tuned 808s in “Jheri Curl Jump,” feels like accepting a private invitation, pulling back the curtain to reveal even more layers hidden in plain sight.
The same is true of Butler’s writing. The smooth, silken shit talk that’s been a cornerstone of his work gives us some of the album’s best moments, like the woozy, Kaputt-like swell of “Deadstock Dude,” a sly declaration that they don’t make ’em like this anymore. Over the cold crush groove on “Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M.,” Butler sizes us up, declaring with deadly accuracy that he is indeed him and we have no hope of catching up. He often delivers his stories of youth, foibles, and struggles in third person, as if he’s a researcher from a distant future, teleporting back to discover the origins of cool. The first three songs delve most directly into these recollections: “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet)” is a character study of a man destined for a creative life, and “Field Notes” offers cautionary tales and advice from the now 57-year-old to a young Butler, hoping he reaches his current form in all possible timelines. In “Show Me Missouri in Mink,” a psychedelic slice of synthesizer R&B, Butler examines pivotal stages of life without judgment or regret and finds peace with the ways they shaped him. The song develops into a slow-burn, lighters-up jam, its long, unhurried coda like getting lost in a sea of echoing, overlapping memories.
Time is one of Butler’s preoccupations—its fleeting nature, its nonlinear experience, its rubberbanding effect on our perception. Album closer “From One Future to Another” is one of the most stunning tracks in the Shabazz Palaces oeuvre, a gorgeous dream pop examination of how age morphs our perspective. “We may gain back the time that’s gone,” he hopes, his robotic falsetto hovering as careening keyboard arpeggios and shoegaze guitar churn behind splashy jazz drums. It is impossible to separate the past from the future, impossible to view the present as completely siloed and singular. Every artistic development, every milestone, every disappointment, every dream and aspiration has a root deep within you. It’s worth digging it all up from time to time.
