Codefendants have shared a new track that celebrates the long-standing connection between punk and hip-hop in a way that feels timely.
If you’re unfamiliar, the band is the melding of some of punk’s greatest, bringing together NOFX’s Fat Mike and Get Dead’s Sam King, alongside Julio “Ceschi” Ramos. And ‘Rivals’ serves as a piece of their upcoming second album ‘LIFERS’.
Though more than anything, the song is all about crossing of boundaries and understanding that we aren’t all that different, especially through the lens of the music we love. That’s why ‘Rivals’ features hip hop legend The D.O.C. and finds all parties delivering their fiercest bars over a driving punk beat. It’s a melding of worlds with a long history that sometimes needs a little nudge to be reminded of that.
The result is fun, fierce, and frantic; here to show us that we can’t change the past, but we can make up for it in the present to make the future better.
Fat Mike had this to say about the song, stating, ““I was hanging with DOC and he was telling me stories of gang life in Compton. I told him that there were punk gangs too. He didn’t believe me. Then I told him about FFF and LADS and Suicidals…. Then he wrote his verses to ‘Rivals.’ It’s pretty fucking awesome that the fukin’ DOC and I got to work on another song together.“
And Julio has this to say about the song’s sentiment, explaining, “Our second track with the legendary DOC stems from conversations about how Punk and Hip Hop are overlapping counter-cultural movements that came out of a similar time period with similar ideals. The DOC even directly mentions the correlations & similarities in his verse while Sam & I mostly talking shit about rappers & punk / tastemaker snobbery. Since we started Codefendants we’ve been confronted by gatekeepers not understanding that we genuinely grew up in both of these worlds of Punk & Hip Hop. When Fat Mike wrote the music for this track he was directly inspired by some of the slower, sludgier punk tracks of the early 80s.”
‘LIFERS’ will be released on April 03.
It will also feature ‘The Right Wrong Man’, which sounds like this.
