Vince Staples & Michael Uzowuru - Winter in Prague

Long Beach rapper Vince Staples is often aligned with either Odd Future or Raider Klan but has thankfully avoided getting too caught up in debilitating tags. He’s peppered features on various tracks and released the promising but sketchy ‘Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1’ as a free download last year but ‘Winter in Prague’, produced by the similarly talented and low-key Michael Uzowuru, is a more fully-realised project.

A mixture of new tracks and re-worked older ones like Twitch and Matlock the mixtape’s tone is cold with vocals muffled by reverb and samples sped-up and looped to sound like snow-storms and biting winds. The dead-eyed Staples and composed Uzowuru have a good thing going and the semi-regal ‘Winter in Prague’ shows a healthy amount of honesty and ambition from the pair.