Blue Sky Black Death was a production duo consisting of Kingston and Young God, formed in the early 2000s in the Bay Area. Over the years, they released their own instrumental music, but also worked with a whole slew of emcees, including artists like Jean Grae, Myka 9, Nacho Picasso, and Sadistik, just to name a few. In 2013, they released their last album as a duo, Glaciers. We didn’t know it at the time, but in 2017, the group announced an indefinite hiatus. Of course, that didn’t mean that they’d stay silent forever. Less than a year later, Young God announced a new alias, Televangel, and now gives us his first solo album under that name, Anthropocene Blues.

If you’ve spent the time with Blue Sky Black Death over the years, you’ll have a fairly good idea what to expect out of Televangel. In fact, the title, Anthropocene Blues, can be seen as a direct continuation of the them of Glaciers, since the word “Anthropocene” refers to the epoch dating from the commencement of human impact on the climate and environment of Earth. So you’ve got an abstract idea about the environmental impact humans are making on our planet as a through line, but then you’ve got a lot of sonic continuation as well. Televangel is continuing to work in this grand and cinematic style of production, where post rock meets downtempo instrumental hip hop to create music that you really need to stop and sit still and actively listen to and absorb to get all of the nuance of each song on the album. It’s not a casual listen album, it’s a stop-what-you’re-doing album, one that demands your full attention as each song builds slowly and surely, as Televangel develops his compositions around musical motifs and interesting rhythmic patterns, layering, with space to let each development breath. It’s an album that you need to just get lost in your head with and let everything bounce around and just sit with you for a while.

I don’t know if and when we’ll get the next Blue Sky Black Death album, but we’ve got the next best thing with Televangel’s Anthropocene Blues. It’s just as grand as ambitious as anything they made as a duo, and picks up where Glaciers left off.