Once upon a time, emcee Stik Figa and producer Miles Bonny both lived in Kansas and began to collaborate. These sessions set things in motion and led to Stik Figa to get signed to Mello Music Group, where he’s released projects with L’Orange and Mark “Seven” Summers. Meanwhile, Bonny moved to New Mexico, and just last fall released an EP called Let It Out that featured himself as a vocalist and Ta-ku as producer. Now, after all this time, the two have reconnected to make an EP called Jewell Ave John, named after the street in Topeka that Stik Figa grew up on.

In a lot of ways, this EP is all about getting back to their roots for Figa and Bonny. They’ve both grown and moved and worked on different types of projects, but Jewell Ave John gives you a glimpse back to when two artists found each other in the bread basket of America and made a connection through hip hop that existed outside of the box. And while it’s fun in that sense, it’s also just a really good EP to listen to that covers a lot of ground in four songs. It opens with “Du-Ragz,” a song full of “yo mamma” shit-talking over this great, off-kilter beat laid down by Bonny that’s just the right mix of fun and weird. By the time you get to the last song, just a couple of tracks later, “Figa of Speech, Pt. 2 (Square Biz),” we’re at this completely different place, where Bonny is produced this really emotional downtempo track that builds up these layers of synthesizers to give this really emotional symphonic feeling to the song. This provides the perfect platform for Figa to go deep on the lyricism, which he does as he spits passionately and cleverly about how he’s had to build a career for himself in hip hop, while also building a life for himself in a society that’s quick to judge him based on skin tone and appearance. It’s a powerful note to end on.

Miles Bonny and Stik Figa have both had interesting careers since they both began making music years ago, and they will continue to work on all sorts of different projects with different people, but there’s something special about the chemistry they have together. That’s evident on Jewell Ave John, an EP on paper that looks more like filler, but in practice in really interesting, unusual, fun, and emotionally moving.