Reviewing Kota the Friend's "To Kill a Sunrise"

If you haven’t heard of the Brooklyn MC Kota the Friend or DJ/producer Statik Selektah, you better catch up.

All lyrics courtesy of Genius.com

Photo Credit: Revolt TV.com

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This past weekend, Kota the Friend dropped To Kill a Sunrise, his collaborative album with legendary producer and Boston native Statik Selektah.

One word to describe this project?

Wow.

Clocking in around 34 minutes in 10 tracks, this should be the model for new projects dropping in the future. Condensed tracklists while spitting true game over the mic that makes an impact on the listener.

When projects go over an hour with more than 14ish tracks, it becomes so much harder for me to tune in for the entire project, which is one of the reasons why I LOVE this project.

After the successes of Lyrics to GO Vol. 2 and Everything, there were high expectations for Kota to meet. The thing is Kota surpassed them by a mile and more.

Starting out with the first track, “Wolves,” Kota talks his shit and makes it clear that he is not in the rap game to simply get a bag and go on his way. Just look at this first verse.

There’s no other way to say it, Kota’s absolute spewing fire throughout this project and the combination of Kota’s delivery with Statik Selektah’s beats are incredible vibes.

Now, let’s bounce to the second track, “Hate,” where Kota delivers one of the coldest verses of the last half decade, “They calling me the snare how I’m following kicks.” When I listened to this project, my inner hip-hop geek came out and this project gave me MF DOOM and Mos Def vibes.

Want some more melodic, chill tracks? Just hit play on "Go Now" which Hallie Supreme kills on his feature. There's one track for every type of atmosphere while staying true to Kota's love of words and hip-hop.

Kota floats through each track stacking metaphors and rhyme schemes with such a relaxed attitude and the production is fantastic, which just makes this album beautiful. To me, Kota put himself in the same category as J.I.D. and Joey Badass when it comes to lyricism, and he’s in the same category as Benny the Butcher and Freddie Gibbs when it comes to consistently great catalogues.

AGAIN, this is MY OPINION, but I believe no Kota project disappoints and once again, Kota hit a home run with this project.