Run The Jewels Collaborates With DJ Premier & Greg Nice for "Ooh LA LA"

With all of the drawbacks of ongoing self-quarantines and social distancing, musicians the world over are taking to live-streaming and digging through their personal archives to release new music to inspire and uplift. Today, Run The Jewels returns at just the right time to deliver their latest single, “Ooh LA LA” with contributions from legendary producer DJ Premier and Greg Nice of Bronx, New York hip-hop duo Nice & Smooth. The new song digs into the archives to sample Gang Starr‘s “Dwyck.”

El-P and Killer Mike officially released their recently previewed track “The Yankee and the Brave” on all streaming platforms today, too. “Ooh LA LA” is a a hard-hitting piano-driven offering that hits all of the traditional Run The Jewels’ marks: confrontational lyrical barrages from two hip-hop heavyweights that’s political, timely and efficient.

“There’s not a lot of classic undermined golden age material that hasn’t been turned into a jam… and I’ve been plotting on this for probably the last three albums,” El-P told Apple Music about Gang Starr’s “Dwyck” sample. “We don’t intentionally do old school music, but our influences and who we are come from an era that is very real.”

“Big shout out to Primo because he made those whole [song] happen. I mean, we hit him up and so we just want to thank him because he was super generous with it. We were like, ‘We want you to be a part of this. We want you to do the cuts.’ For people who don’t know, that’s DJ Premiere cutting at the end of it,” El-P continued.

The group also discussed the recent cancellation of their upcoming Public Service Announcement Tour alongside Rage Against The Machine. “I was already sick. I got allergies,” Killer Mike said. “I was disappointed we weren’t going to get on the road, but in terms of how I felt, I was already laid out anyway. So nothing much changed in terms of it.”

Check out “Ooh LA LA” from Run The Jewels and stay tuned for their fourth album, RTJ4 to release later this year. The duo also recently joined Rick Rubin for an enlightening podcast about their creative process and what’s to come via his Broken Record Podcast. In more music news, Conway the Machine and The Alchemist were joined by ScHoolboy Q for their new single “Shoot Sideways”.