Ghettosocks, DK - Listen to the Masters

Burgeoning Canadian producer DK and award-winning MC Ghettosocks drop their first collaborative album, Listen to the Masters, out today via Black Buffalo Records and Fat Beats. Listen HERE. The Nova Scotia-based beatsmith and Ghettosocks, who CBC ranked as one of “The 25 Greatest Canadian Rappers Ever,” have created an album that firmly places them in the lineage of great rapper-producer duos. DK, known for his warm, analog-meets-digital hybrids of wistful yet modern boom-bap, deftly blends dust-coated samples of funk, soul, jazz, and more with live instrumentation. His thumping and timeless beats score Ghettosocks’ intellectual yet approachable lyricism as well as sharp darts shot by everyone from venerated grandmasters like CL Smooth, El Da Sensei, and Moka Only to Rome Streetz, the celebrated narrator of grim New York criminology raps.

Listen to the Masters opens with 2019’s “Reflections,” the single that served as the album’s foundation and guiding light. The Coast praised DK’s crackling, soulful, and jazz-accented boom-bap and Ghettosocks’ incisive perspective multi-layered bars, calling the track somewhere between “a lost A Tribe Called Quest joint” and a Blackstar b-side. The album’s second single, “What It Seems,” finds Ghettosocks spitting alongside underground heavyweights Skyzoo and Rome Streetz, each MC shedding light on the current state of politics and socioeconomics, crime, poverty, and injustice in their shared and respective worlds.

Throughout Listen to the Masters, DK, Ghettosocks, and the diverse roster of elite rappers achieve a brilliant balancing act. They traffic in heavy subjects like death, our pandemic dystopia, toxic masculinity, and more without sacrificing that smoky, relaxed vibe that keeps you bobbing your head. Listen to the Masters ushers in a new era of progressive crate-digging hip-hop and insightful rapping, establishing DK as one of Canada’s brightest producorial talents and reminding the world that Ghettosocks is forever one of the country’s most virtuosic lyricists.