ProStudioMasters.com

Hip Hop icon Vince Staples has released his eighth studio album, Dark Times, out via Def Jam Recordings. A new era in the prolific artist’s canon, the album is a muscular and revelatory work refining elements that have been present in his catalog for the last decade: dense lyricism over lush, layered beats; wry, melancholic observations about life; and finding pockets of light in an endless dark. Recorded over the course of seven months in North Hollywood, the album title came intuitively to Staples after he listened to the record in full, noticing heavy motifs that kept reappearing. The album cover, featuring a faintly seen noose, was similarly intuitive. “I’m Black, and that’s what we’re evading,” he says of the inspiration behind the image. “We all have our things that could kill us. We all have that imminent threat.” Dark Times follows Staples’ 2022 critically acclaimed album Ramona Park Broke My Heart, which was hailed as one of the best albums of the year by Clash, Complex, The Fader, Rolling Stone, and Vulture among others. The Los Angeles Times praised Staples as “a nimble rapper, deftly maneuvering through verses depicting the street politics of his native Long Beach,” while Pitchfork called the album “a richly detailed, deadpan elegy for his stolen youth.”