SkyBlew is an emcee from Chapel Hill who started releasing music in the late 2000s. He had a bit of a breakthrough in the mid-2010s when Mega Ran decided to release SkyBlew’s album, Race For Your Life, SkyBlew, on his own Random Beats label. Since that time, SkyBlew has been off to the races, dropping all sorts of interesting projects and collaborating with a plethora of artists. His most recent project came in 2021, when he teamed up with Navo the Maestro to drop their album, Keys of Light. Now he returns to one of his most frequent and long-term collaborators, Scottie Royal, who have teamed up to release a new full-length album, A Soulful Taste of Jazz: The Royal Blew Experience.

Scottie Royal is a producer from Charlotte who has also been releasing music since the late 2000s. In that time, he’s worked with artists like Ardamus, Mega Ran, and Lazarus. More than anyone, though, he’s worked with SkyBlew consistently and to great success. One listen to A Soulful Taste of Jazz, and you can easily see why these two keep coming back to each other to make some hip hop. Scottie Royal has a style of production that wavers between the jazzy East Coast boom bap of the early ‘90s and the laidback soulful sounds of Dilla in the late ‘90s. This is right in SkyBlew’s wheelhouse, who is able to just vibe off of what Royal is throwing down and just craft these delightful flows that just seem to dance above the beats. Blew has a ton of charisma on the mic, and he’s developed the ability over the years of crafting these really dense verses, but he then makes them feel as light as a feather the way he rhymes in a style that feels so casual and melodic at the same time. It also doesn’t hurt that SkyBlew has a knack as an emcee for packing his lyrics with some really colorful imagery, but then takes it to another level by weaving in this undertone of optimism and dreaming of a better future, all without ever feeling too corny. It’s not an easy feat, but SkyBlew and Scottie Royal have been at this long enough and really understand where each other is coming from, and in the process they’ve been able to make some really beautiful and moving hip hop.

A Soulful Taste of Jazz: The Royal Blew Experience is exactly the album you expect from SkyBlew and Scottie Royal, and I mean that in the best way possible. They’ve been carving out a niche for themselves for a while, and they hold themselves to an incredibly high standard that means we keep getting these gorgeous hip hop albums from them that sound better each time you listen to them.