It's A Style Sport

ENNAKKOTILAUS. Ilmestyy 23.10.2026.

With bravado, precision, and mesmerizing authenticity, ever-evolving musician, producer, and rapper Ishmael Butler returns as Shabazz Palaces with It’s a Style Sport, out on Oct 23 via Sub Pop Records. Following 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, It’s a Style Sport stays true to Shabazz Palaces’ form in its daring show of experimental, avant-hip-hop and free-form poetry, but also reveals a more reflective and upfront side of the Seattle-based musician than we’ve seen before. It’s a Style Sport finds Butler compiling what he’s learned from his storied, dense career into a playful, shimmering portal, again proving himself an artist of chameleonic ambition, fueled by curiosity, courage, and a limitless imagination.

Butler’s work has long been situated in the canon of Afrofuturist trailblazers like Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, and Pharoah Saunders, and for good reason – his work resides along the edges of the surreal, crafted with soundscapes and stories that are speculative, unapologetically Black, and ooze wonder of a different realm. Yet here, we see the rapper engaging in what could be considered an “Afro-fractal” poetic, what the artist Char Jeré describes as “a way of defiling a linear, colonial, capitalist temporality. It makes the future less of a destination and more of an ongoing rehearsal or ritual. The future and the past are happening constantly and simultaneously.” On It’s a Style Sport, a visage of Butler’s past lives as a rapper and performer is flung up against his contemporary persona, taunting and illuminating. At its core, It’s a Style Sport is an ode to the rap game of years past, when the playfully competitive ambition drove the genre to always outdo, outrun, and out-finesse your peers.

1. Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)
2. Field Notes
3. Show Me Missouri In Mink
4. Jheri Curl Jump
5. Deadstock Dude
6. Tongue In Chic
7. Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M.
8. Olivia According To Touch
9. Money Can’t Save Your Mind
10. From One Future To Another