Int Eighty might not be a name you immediately recognize, but chances are that’s because a lot of people collapse the name of the group Dual Core onto the emcee (overlooking the excellent work that producer c64 brings to the table). With that said, Int Eighty recently got inspired by watching Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and has now given us reason to relearn his name as he gives us his first official solo EP, Loyalty.

For this project, Int Eighty reached out to a frequent collaborator in Mikal kHill. The two worked together before as the group The Troubleshooters, but in this scenario, kHill is just serving as producer to help Int Eighty’s vision of this FMA hip hop project to come to life. So in this way, Int Eighty made an excellent choice in that he’s reaching out to a friend that he has a working chemistry with, but he’s also working with someone who has had success in the past putting together themed EPs and mixtapes based on TV shows, movies, and books. kHill expertly flips the source material and transforms it into something new that absolutely slaps, aided by the secret weapon of the EP, Tobe “Tobotious” Donohue, who takes everything to the next level with his turntablism and gives the project the third heat it needs. This is all great and sets Int Eighty up for success, but ultimately it falls on him to how well this is going to work. When you’re setting about to make a nerdcore project like this, or really any sort of fan-fic type of project, there’s a real difference between projects that just engage with the source material on a surface level, which usually rely on other people to catch references and whatnot, and those projects that dive deep and get at the core of what makes the source material resonate with fans. The latter is what Int Eighty has done with Loyalty, and that is why it works so well. When you get down to the nitty gritty of the source material and get to issues of war and brotherhood on a really emotional level, you can turn that into hip hop that works whether or not you’ve ever seen Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. You might catch a reference or two, but it’s Int Eighty’s deft lyrical work in breaking down the characters, inhabiting their voices, and getting to core of the story that makes this some hip hop you can really sink your teeth into.

Loyalty is technically Int Eighty’s first solo EP, but he’s been at this hip hop thing for a long time now, and he handles this new project with the veteran know-how you’d expect from him. He assembles a good team, and then uses that foundation to create some really meaningful hip hop.