North Carolina emcee SkyBlew has been releasing some truly excellent albums over the last couple of years, including my personal favorite, SkyBlew The Cowardly Boy! in 2016. Over the last year, though, he’s remained relatively silent after he released his project with Sublime Cloud. Now the silence is broken, and he has emerged with two new projects. One of those projects is this collaboration with a pair of South Korean producers named A June & J Beat, Dreams of an Autumn Kismet.

These might be new collaborators for SkyBlew, and they might come from halfway across the globe, but the second you press play, this will immediately sound familiar. That’s because A June & J Beat are laying down some absolutely gorgeous, smooth, jazz-sampling beats, the type where SkyBlew can just sit back in the pocket and do his thing. If you’ve spent time with any of SkyBlew’s previous projects, you know this is right in his wheelhouse, and it puts him in perfect position to succeed. SkyBlew has this really wordy flow, but he makes it sound incredibly smooth and effortless as he spits his rhymes, going from philosophical musings to personal tales to nerdy references about anime or whatnot. It’s an album that is just incredibly easy to listen to and enjoy, much like a lot of SkyBlew’s previous outings. A June & J Beat come up with some really great grooves with hooks that will grab your ear right away, and SkyBlew is so conversational and relatable on the microphone, it feels like you’re catching up with an old friend each time he drops an album. On top of all this, this album sounds so easy-going, you might not realize how much is happening and how many moving pieces there are the first time you listen to it. The good news is that this is the type of album that you’ll not only want to listen to over and over, you’re bound to catch something new each and every time.

The wait and the silence was worth it if this is what SkyBlew was cooking up. Dreams of an Autumn Kismet is a gorgeous album with great chemistry between producers A June & J Beat and emcee SkyBlew, showing that music can indeed bring people together from all walks of life to make some truly dope hip hop.