Hermit Kingdom is an Austin-based hip hop collective, consisting of core members Flobama, Philos, and Mugger (there have been others that have come and gone). With member Philos leaving to do a two-year stint with the Peace Corps, the group felt the pressure to finally deliver an official debut album from the collective, which is now here in the form of Tarot.

It’s funny how perspective can change things. Just about a year and a half ago, Philos and Flobama released an album together called Love Hugs Drugs, which was a very personal and focused album that was born out of a very tough time in Philos’s life. Fast forward to now, and though Philos is on the brink of a major life change, when they add Mugger to the mix and make this a crew album, suddenly the perspective is a lot more irreverent and humorous. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just an interesting compare/contrast between the two projects. It almost feels like Mugger is the “X” factor of the group. The production is handled between Flobama and Mugger, who manage to walk the line between some truly bizarre beats, with all sorts of starts and stops and sudden turns, and some truly accessible funky beats that you can easily groove to. It’s almost as if they want to prove that they can drop some solid boom bap or whatever pop beats you want, but they aren’t really interested in that. This is similarly true on the mic, where Philos joins Flobama and Mugger. Any one of these emcees could spit straight verses for you, and other projects they have done so to great effect. But on this album, they are more concerned with riffing off of each other and subverting your expectations. Not only is the subject matter all over the map, running the gamut from addressing police brutality to singing the praises of eating booty, their voices are bouncing all over your stereo, coming at you in all sorts of different frequencies and styles as well. In the end, what you get is a sort of throwback album. By this I mean that Tarot truly feels like an underground hip hop album, one that doesn’t sound anything close to what you might hear on your mainstream media sources. This sounds like you discovered something that you weren’t supposed to hear, but now that you have, you know that there are so many more possibilities out there for what hip hop can sound like. This is a bouncing off the walls good time.

Hermit Kingdom in this form will be going on hiatus, at least for the near future. In the meantime, we finally get an album in Tarot to mark a place in time, but also to celebrate all of the crazy experimentation, skill, inventiveness, and fun that this crew brought to the Austin hip hop scene.