Spend 6 Minutes with Ghostface’s 36 Seasons

This ain't no ordinary hip-hop album.more

That's the word from Wes Mingus, whose soul band/production squad the Revelations provide the backings for Ghostface Killah's forthcoming 36 Seasons. The album won't drop until Dec. 9, but earlier today, the Ghost camp released a six-minute sampler mixed by DJ 7L. The blended snippets hint at a record that's soulful yet heavy as a muv, and that's down to the somewhat unorthodox approach.

"Musically, it was decided at the beginning that this would be a very non-traditional, more organic hip-hop album—one where all of the sounds created would be by real players, on real instruments, while still maintaining the spirit and boom-bap purity of classic hip-hop," Mingus says. "No digital keyboards or samplers were used."

Lyrically, 36 Seasons stems from a 15-stanza poem written by comic artist Matthew Rosenberg, who imagined the Wu-Tang rhymer as "Staten Island vigilante" out to save his community and right personal wrongs.

He's out for A Better Tomorrow, you might say, which is the name of the Wu record that lands Dec. 2.