Run the Jewels just made the soundtrack for end times

America's burning? Killer Mike and El-P have something to say about that.

You can hear the passion, smell the intensity, feel the heat. Across the first few songs of Run the Jewels’ raw, revolutionary new album RTJ4, Killer Mike’s already fired up, and his rap-buddy partner-in-crime El-P wisely just gets out of his way.

“I can't let the pigs kill me, I got too much pride,” bellows Mike over the frenetic kickdrums of Yankee and the Brave, a warning shot of what’s to follow. “Fuck the fuckin’ law,” he rants over DJ Premier’s stunning Greg Nice-sampling beat for Ooh La La. “You've been hypnotized and Twitter-ised by silly guys,” he continues on the clattering Goonies vs E.T.

Then he gets to Walking in the Snow, the bruising centrepiece of RTJ4, and Mike goes on an absolute tear. In several scintillating lines, he charts a black American boy’s growth from baby, to toddler, to prison. “The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four / Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored.”

He keeps going, building to a crescendo, including a killer line that ranks among the best of the Atlanta rapper’s 25-year career. “You so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me / And 'til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper…” - his voice breaks and he creaks out the next three words - “I can’t breathe.”

If that statement sounds familiar, it should. It’s been written on placards, chanted by protesters and sprayed across looted buildings relentlessly across the past week, a quote from George Floyd, the Minneapolis dad and rapper who was killed at the hands of a white police officer during an incident that has sparked worldwide protests over the past week.

When Killer Mike gets to that line, you can’t help but think it must have been written and recorded sometime over the past seven days. Every lyric, every hook, and every guest appearance on RTJ4 sounds like it was written to soundtrack the flames burning across American streets right now.

But, as El-P confirmed on Twitter, it wasn’t. Killer Mike may have been dragged into the spotlight this week for reasons different to his music, but he wrote that verse back in 2019, instead quoting Eric Garner, another black American who died at the hands of police in 2014.

Timing is everything, and RTJ4’s early release yesterday, a day earlier than planned, couldn’t be more perfect. Like Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Boltcutters, an album crafted during seven years of self-isolation then released in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that put everyone in her shoes, Run the Jewels have crafted an album designed to be slammed right now.

Across tracks like Never Look Back, The Ground Below and A Few Words For the Firing Squad (Radiation), the duo rant, rave and bellow about injustice, inhumanity and police brutality. “This whole world's a shit moat, filled to the brim like GitMo,” declares El-P at one point, trying to keep up with Mike.

It’s the ultimate rage against the machine, then Zach de la Rocha shows up on JU$T, hollering its hook, “Look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar,” like a man possessed. You can just imagine crowds blaring it back at them - when they’re allowed to tour again.

How prescient is RTJ4? At one point, over the blaring horns of Holy Calamfuck, a song that reminds me of lost nights in the Big Day Out’s Boiler Room in the late 90s, a kid yells, “More fire!” like he’s throwing plywood onto one of those bonfires buring in front of the White House.

In other words, RTJ4 is the soundtrack for our times. Let’s hope the right people are listening in.

• If you’d like to support or donate to the Black Lives Matter movement, here is a list of charities supported by Run the Jewels.