Avant Hip-hop Outfit the Young Mothers Deliver “Attica Black” (premiere)

Self Sabotage unleashes the new effort from the Young Mothers, Morose, on June 22. If new track, “Attica Black” is any indication, the full album promises to be a dose of highly experimentally yet deeply focused material that take up issues of social justice and the darker sides of our times. There is a heaviness that lurks at the tune’s corners and an unapologetic ferocity at its center as the song moves this way and that across its seven-plus minutes, prodding and poking the listener toward confrontation, toward leading one’s self in a kind of inner revolution that might ultimately spur a larger, external one.

Members of the Thing, White Denim, MF Doom, and Akkolyte have come together under this (relatively) new roof to create a sound that blends free jazz and hip-hop, seeing no distance between them. There is room for other music, soulful variations on worldwide sounds, deviations and corruptions as plentiful and bountiful as the mind might allow. Latin fuses with African fuses with European and on and on until there is no distinction.

Having come together in 2012 and take its name from a Houston, Texas community project for teen mothers, this uncompromising group of players delivers an unforgettable listening experience that listeners will doubtless be parsing for some time to come.

Morose will be available on LP, CD and download on 22 June via Self Sabotage Records. (Pre-order at Big Cartel-Self Sabotage).