Two years ago, New York emcee PremRock and Toronto producer Fresh Kils teamed up to release their first album together, Leave in Tact. It showed a great chemistry between the two, and it was only a matter of time before we heard from them again. Now the wait is over, as they release their first proper follow up, an EP called Poet’s Payday.

As I first listened to Poet’s Payday, I was very excited by the opening track, “Somebody Up There,” which features this minimalist jazzy production from Kils that really feeds into PremRock’s inner beatnik. PremRock is a really great storyteller in his lyrics, and it’s those songs that always end up becoming my favorite of his. Also, even though I’ve heard a million different beats from Fresh Kils, I had never heard him work quite in this fashion, with so little percussion, and the saxophone so much in the forefront. As the EP progresses, it begins to feel a little more like a grab bag of material. You get a hard, dark underground hip hop crew track featuring billy woods and Vekked in “Fentanyl,” a goofier crew track in “Bad Sign,” which features Zilla Rocca and DJ Mo Niklz. It’s really on “Gin Joint,” that we get back to the sound promised at the beginning. These tracks are my favorite, obviously, and I would have loved to have seen an entire EP devoted to exploring that style between the two of them. I think it could have been really interesting and different. As it is, we get an EP that feels a little bit more like a grab bag of stuff they’ve been working on. There’s not one thing that’s particularly bad or doesn’t work, it’s more that they don’t necessarily flow or feel at home right next to each other the way that their previous project, Leave in Tact worked so well as a collection of songs.

Poet’s Payday is a good EP from an emcee and producer that clearly get along and wanted to try out some different material. It might not all come together to sound really coherent as an EP, but it is a solid collection of interesting hip hop, with a few standouts. I’m sure their next major project together will take things to the next level.