Skyzoo has been in the Rap game for over a decade and a half now. Having worked with 9th Wonder, EPMD, and Spike Lee, the MC has devoted his career to sharpening his skills. The Brooklyn, New Yorker is prepping to drop an album, In Celebration Of Us (February 2) via First Generation Rich/EMPIRE. The latest offering, “Baker’s Dozen,” is a driving piano-driven track produced by Apollo Brown and featuring Grammy-nominated singer Raheem DeVaughn on the song’s hook.

Heads hear Skyzoo in deep focus, weaving through the track’s piano loop and hard percussion with a precise flow. S-K-Y spits a breakneck scheme of rhymes paired with sly punchlines: “One time for the love of the lead and the way it had us /  And the irony of dotting the beam on whatever matters / Black lives in black 5’s, the frame boxing out / I’m ‘Luke Caging’ but more related to ‘Cottonmouth.'” His rapping is complemented with Raheem DeVaughn’s simple hook demands, “Bake the cake, bake the cake, bake the cake.” The inspiration derived from D’Angelo’s classic “Devil’s Pie” resonates in Apollo Brown’s beat and Skyzoo and Raheem’s urgency.

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“On this album, I wanted to tap into the present, more so than any other album of mine as far as full projects,” Skyzoo told Complex. “From cultural appropriation and gentrification to police brutality and the irony of motives behind bigger motives, it’s an album that explores who we are and why we are where we are in society, as a people. What’s been done to us and what we’ve done to ourselves, mainly out of confused necessity, all while celebrating us in the process.”

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Apollo Brown, Skyzoo, and Raheem DeVaughn are certainly no strangers to each other. Skyzoo and DeVaughn have teamed up before with “Drew & Derwin” of Sky’s 2012 album, A Dream Deferred, while Sky and Brown joined full-length forced for 2016’s The Easy Truth. In Celebration Of Us will be Skyzoo’s follow-up to his recent project, Peddler Themes.

#BonusBeat: A preview sampler of In Celebration Of Us:

This LP arrives in two weeks.