More or Les is a emcee/producer/deejay from Toronto, and part of the gigantic Backburner Crew. While we just heard from him on the latest Backburner album, Continuum, his last solo project came last fall, when he dropped his Post Human EP. Now he’s back with a new beat tape inspire by Cowboy Bebop, Beats for Bounty Hunters.

If you’ve ever wondered what the key to making a good nerdcore project is, look no further than Beats for Bounty Hunters. Longtime fans of Cowboy Bebop can surely breakdown all of the references buried within the song titles, samples, artwork, and album description. At the same time, if you are like me and have never watched the show, you can just listen to this project as a hip hop fan and enjoy a collection of great beats. That’s because More or Les isn’t just content to make a few clever references and then just coast on some generic boom bap beats. He’s putting in the work to make some top tier beats – complex, evolving, varied, and really damn funky. It just so happens that these beats also have this anime theme to them that gives you another layer in which to dive in and enjoy the text, but first and foremost this is about just making high quality music that bumps from start to finish. This way, while you’re nodding your head, you can imagine your own journey through space and really have fun with it, or just sit back and enjoy these killer grooves. There’s not wrong way to listen to this project.

Beats for Bounty Hunters is simple enough on paper, but More or Les demonstrates with this project that he isn’t willing to settle for being a mid-tier artist. No, he took the idea of a themed beat tape and went to work cleverly flipping samples, finding undeniable grooves, and developing each track so that the whole project can take you on this emotional journey.