Seven years ago, the Milestone Club in Charlotte decided to throw an event in the middle of the summer called the Beach Formal. In years past, Mikal kHill had been invited to play, where he just did a normal set and dressed appropriately for the occasion. This year, kHill upped the ante and re-imagined his songs as surf rock. The set went so well that kHill decided to record five of these songs and release them as beachy keen.

Normally, when you think of surf rock or hip hop, you don’t think of them at the same time. If someone did start this conversation about how they were connected, you’d still probably think to find a couple of degrees of separation between the two genres. So when I heard about kHill’s project, I have to admit I was a little bit sceptic – I didn’t think it was going to be bad, but I wasn’t sure how it would work beyond a novelty level. Then I listened to the damn thing, and I was more than pleasantly surprised at just how well this thing worked. It quickly becomes clear that kHill didn’t want to do this if he couldn’t do it right, and he definitely put in the time to arrange these five songs in a way that is completely respectful to the surf rock genre and works really well, all while not sacrificing what these songs were when they were originally written as hip hop songs. Of course, it helps that on top of being an emcee and producer, kHill is also a guitarist and singer that has worked in some alternative, indie, and folk rock into his music at various points in his career, so it’s not as big of a jump for him as it would be for other artists, but that doesn’t mean that what he did was easy. What he did was take a song like “Inside the Box,” break down the beats and riffs and structure of the song, build it back up so that we get the snare and guitar sounds and rhythms that we associate with surf rock, and then still finds the pocket of the groove to rap his verses, and…it works.

If you told me even a month ago that one of my favorite releases of the summer was going to be a hip hop artist re-recording five of their songs in the style of surf rock, I probably would have looked at you like you had two heads. But now we are here, and beachy keen is one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer. Kudos to Mikal kHill for pulling this project off so well.