Scott thrILL is a producer from Los Angeles that has been making music for over ten years at this point. Most recently, he released an instrumental collection called Pinz & Needlz Collection back in November. Now, he’s ready to start 2021 with his fourth solo album, thrILLmatic.

Sometimes you don’t need anything necessarily new, you just need something done really well. And that’s exactly what thrILL is doing with thrILLmatic. He’s not reinventing the instrumental hip hop album, he’s just giving you an incredibly solid breakbeat-driven collection of tracks that come together to create a sum that’s bigger than it’s parts. With only two of the thirty tracks coming in at over two minutes, you’re not getting a lot of long, overly developed compositions. On the flip side, you are getting more than just a bunch of random beat samples – there is a lot of care and thought going into these tracks, and thrILL is giving you a lot more to sink your teeth into than just a quick groove that loops a couple of times. Where you really start to appreciate the work that thrILL is doing, though, is once you’ve spent enough time to get through a few tracks, and you start to see how well everything flows together and how thrILL has put all of these different musical ideas in conversation with each other. As you work your way through the album, you’ll get different looks from thrILL as he gives you everything from soul-sampling horn hits with some funky boom bap drums to some really smooth and laid back jazz that you can groove to. He also does a great job of spreading out and picking just the right spots to add some vocal clips to segue between tracks and create some further conversation about the music. The whole thing is done with a lot of care, and it becomes obvious that thrILL is a true student of the craft of digging and sampling.

If you haven’t been following him, thrILLmatic is a great introduction to Scott thrILL. It’s an incredibly well crafted album with a lot of soul that he obviously put a lot of work into. As an added bonus, if you’re feeling this album, he also recently put a lot of his back catalogue on Bandcamp to make it easy to find.