"Back to giving you the product out the trunk," that is the premise behind Michael Aristotle's latest drop, a rough string of freestyles exclusively available for free via Audiomack, a choice that Aristotle says revives the nostalgic feel of mixtape downloads.
The last time we checked in with the Atlanta-reared emcee, he gave us the four-track E effort, a fiery collection of some of his most impressive outputs and before he gets ready for the encore, Aristotle has bridged the gap with Almost A Tape, the predecessor to his debut studio album Almost There.
Linking up with producer Wili Hendrixs, Aristotle drops off Almost A Tape as an ode to Gangsta Grillz and Southern Smoke mixtape series, a time gone by when album rollouts were not complete without the loose mixtape drop. "Going back to basics," says Mikey. "CDs out the trunk, directly to the people in this era we’re in.
"I spent the last half of 2017 & first half of 2018 working on my debut album “Almost There”," Michael adds of the project. "Then I got into songwriting for the rest of the year after some big opportunities happened [...] things felt a little bit like a job, so I took some time in between and recorded this tape. [Wili and I] thought it would be cool to give my listeners some free raps like the mixtape age we kind of grew up on. We kept the mic on, friends who came to the sessions would get in the booth and goof around while we’d record. I look at this tape as exercise. I wrote R&B songs for artists for almost a year and felt I needed to get back to rapping. This tape was inspired by Pharrell's In My Mind prequel, Dedication 2, Wiz’s Burn After Rolling, Gangsta Grillz, Childish Gambino’s stn mtn."