Emapea is a producer from Poland who has been releasing music for six years now. He is best known to American audiences for his 2020 collaboration with Los Angeles emcee Kid Abstrakt, Jazzy Vibes. His latest project came just this past September, when he dropped the instrumental album, Bees, Trees, and Flowers. Now he’s back with a new instrumental EP, Smuggling Town.

Sometimes you don’t need to overthink things. Just play to your strengths and have fun with it. That’s exactly what Emapea has done here on Smuggling Town. In four tracks, he’s giving us some nice variety, but ultimately, you’re getting some great record-sampling boom bap that will get your head nodding. On the opening track, “7 inch,” Emapea gets meta with it, cleverly flipping some samples that helps him craft a funky ode to the specific vinyl format. From there, he goes more laid back and downtempo with “True Fam,” before we get to the late night vibes of the title track. Emapea then dials up the gritty, ominous vibes, channeling that mid-‘90s East Coast underground sound on “Takeover.” It’s all very accessible, but what makes this EP work as well as it does is the attention to detail and development that Emapea puts into his work. He could have just sat back with the basic grooves of these tracks and just called it a beat tape and moved onto the next. Instead, Emapea has carefully crafted these four tracks and sequenced them in such a way that you really get taken on this sonic journey that will not just get your head nodding, but it will really get your imagination flowing as well as you start to piece together your own narrative to this EP.

Smuggling Town is fairly straightforward in its composition, but it is with simpler releases like this that the more talented and experienced producers who are willing to put in the work can separate themselves from the rest of the pack. Emapea takes these four tracks and elevates them and gives you an instrumental EP that you can keep coming back to.