Artist

Run the Jewels

Atlanta, United States · Formed 2013

Run the Jewels is a music group from Atlanta, United States, active since 2013. Their discography on Gatefold includes 8 records.

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Albums tracked

403

In collections

2013

Since

Biography

El-P hauled an Ensoniq ASR-10 through the nineties underground until the damn thing practically smoked, producing whole careers out of grimy Brooklyn apartments while Mike was down in Atlanta trading heavyweight sixteen-bar verses with Outkast. By 2011, both of them were staring at the margins of an industry that treats veteran rappers like expired milk. Jason DeMarco at Adult Swim threw them into a room together just to see what kind of car crash would happen. The result was not some polite coast-to-coast summit meeting; it was two battle-tested lifers realizing they could punch through the drywall of rap radio by being twice as loud and four times as mean as anyone half their age. Their records operate like controlled demolitions. El-P builds beats that hit like sheet metal dropped from a third-story window, all distorted synth fuzz and neck-snapping snares, giving Mike's booming Baptist pulpit delivery an iron-plated tank to roll in. They gave the albums away for free on the internet because they knew live venues would pay the rent once crowds figured out what kind of riot they were running. It is unvarnished, foul-mouthed, and politically vicious rap music made by guys who treat the booth like an interrogation room.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Run the Jewels

The pivots — what forced Run the Jewels to reinvent.

The Free Tape Ambush
They were supposed to be a one-off side project between two indie veterans who had already peaked on paper. Instead, El-P and Killer Mike dropped the self-titled debut in 2013 as a free digital download with no major-label machine behind it. The tracks sounded raw, hurried, and downright feral, propelled by blown-out 808s and back-to-back tag-team verses that completely ignored radio formatting. Fans treated the free files like contraband, turning what could have been a footnote into sold-out club tours.
The Zack de la Rocha War Machine
By 2014, the joke had turned deadly serious. They cut Run the Jewels 2 with a darker, denser industrial bottom end, dragging Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha into the booth on 'Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)'. Mike's verses shifted from standard shit-talk to furious, boots-on-the-ground political agitation following unrest in Ferguson. The sound hardened into monolithic protest music that landed on mainstream year-end lists without compromising an inch of tape distortion.
The Stadium Subwoofers
When RTJ4 landed in the summer of 2020, American streets were on fire and the duo was suddenly positioned as the defining soundtrack of that rupture. El-P upgraded the mixing board crunch into stadium-sized bass designed to shake arena rafters, bringing in Mavis Staples and Josh Homme to flesh out the edges. Mike's delivery on tracks like 'Walking in the Snow' sounded tragically prescient, recorded months before the news cycles that mirrored his lyrics. It finished their climb from scruffy underground heroes to bulletproof festival headliners.

Influences

Public Enemy — The Bomb Squad's wall-of-noise production style is the direct blueprint for how El-P layers abrasive sirens and screeching samples under rap verses. You hear Chuck D's booming, authoritative megaphone delivery echoed directly in Killer Mike's full-throated political broadsides. It is the gold standard for treating hip-hop as high-decibel street-level journalism.
Outkast — Killer Mike was brought up inside the Dungeon Family orbit and cut his teeth on tracks like 'The Whole World'. Big Boi and Andre 3000 taught him how to drop dense, multisyllabic southern game without losing the rhythmic bounce of the rhythm section. That Atlanta cadence gives Run the Jewels half of its fundamental DNA.
Company Flow — El-P founded the group in Queens and set the rules for aggressive, anti-corporate independent rap on their 1997 record Funcrusher Plus. His signature sci-fi dystopia imagery and jagged boom-bap rhythms began right there in those early independent sessions. Without Company Flow kicking open the underground door, there is no El-P production style for Mike to rap over.
Rage Against the Machine — Zack de la Rocha is not just a frequent studio collaborator on their records; his band proved that militant radical politics could pack arenas if the riffs hit hard enough. El-P's guitar-heavy synths on tracks like 'Close Your Eyes' mirror Tom Morello's aggressive hip-hop pedal work. They inherited the mantle of loud, unapologetic arena-rap-rock rebellion.
Ice Cube — Killer Mike has routinely cited Cube's ferocious run on AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted and The Predator as his model for merciless lyrical combat. The snarling, confrontational humor mixed with unapologetic Black radical politics is pure early nineties West Coast fury. Mike channels that exact same sneering, brick-through-a-window vocal delivery.