exociety is a collective from Austin built round the artists Scuare, Rav, Kill Bill, and Airospace. They are currently on tour through April, their first extensive tour as a collective. To help drum up support for the tour, they have released a collective album, deception falls.

deception falls feels like a throwback in many ways, but mostly just in the way that we don’t get crew albums like this very often anymore. The group is producing a chunk of the album themselves, but also getting assists from autumn keys, seito, and Raw Stiles. Together, they’ve made an album that starts off sounding pretty modern, playing with trap and synth pop sounds, but then keeps reaching further and further back with the hip hop styles, also going further underground in the process, but always sequencing things just right and finding the common threads between the beats to make everything feel like it fits together nicely. On the mic, you’re getting the best of what a crew album should be, which is a group of talented individuals who come together to outdo each other, whether that be with shit talk or abstract wordplay, but also to make each other break and crack up. As a result, it’s the type of album that makes you feel like you’re in the room with them as they were recording, it just has that loose and fun feel to it. There is some room for some serious and personal lyricism, but mostly an album like this is about the barn burners, and nothing bumps harder than a track like “Blunts & Clementines,” one of the standouts of the album, which just sound like it was made to crush their live show.

deception falls is a fun album from an Austin crew in exociety that will hopefully be getting a lot more love as they tour across the country this spring. This album is everything you want from a crew album, with great beats and great lyricism, but above all else, it’s about comradery and having a good time.