Emceein’ Eye is an emcee from North Carolina who is more than a decade into his recording career. The last we heard from him was back in 2020, when he dropped his full-length album, Never Comply. Now he’s back with a new EP, Nothing Beats a Try.

For this project, Emceein’ Eye is working with Richmond artist PT Burnem as producer. Together, they are both handling live instrumentation for the album, with Eye on guitar, vocals, percussion, and keyboards and Burnem on Synths, beats, sampling, and his “dustkat dream drum machine” (a contraption of striking solenoid pistons hitting bells and cymbals and all kinds of weirdness). Through all of this, they construct a sound that is familiar to Cold Rhymes fans, as they meld this bluesy garage rock with some classic East Coast boom bap. Burnem has been a friend and mentor to Eye for about 13 years, and you can hear that kind of chemistry coming through with the natural grooves and high energy level throughout the album. On the mic, Emceein’ Eye is at his most vulnerable and intimate. Since we last heard from him three years ago, Emceein’ Eye lost both his mom and his brother. In fact, the title of the project comes from a phrase that Eye’s mother often said him. That said, while this is a project that deals with grief, that doesn’t mean it has to be full of sad music. There is some tenderness, to be sure, but this is ultimately a project about celebrating the lives that are closest to you, and finding the strength to move forward in the face of this adversity. When you put all of this together, you get a project that feels so much bigger and more emotional than your typical 6-song EP.

Nothing Beats a Try is a special release from Emceein’ Eye. It was made under unique circumstances that weighed heavy on him, and so he called in a long-time friend and collaborator in PT Burnem, someone he could trust with being vulnerable around, and proceeded to put his all into the recordings.