Equal parts red-hot fire and cold hard reality, Killer Mike and El-P’s third album as Run The Jewels is a muscular call to arms.
RTJ3 was the best Christmas present we never knew we asked for.
RTJ3 is an excellent bookend to 2016, but it’s best used as a guide to the future, 2017 and beyond.
Run the Jewels 3 is a rap armoury for hard times, a hip-hop bullhorn that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.
Furious and hungry -- with endlessly quotable lyrical zingers to spare -- RTJ3's potency isn't as immediate as RTJ2. However, once it digs its claws in, RTJ3 reveals itself as their best work to date.
Nobody fresh out of the blocks could ever make a record this vital sound quite so effortless.
One of the few positives of the political shit-storm that struck the US in 2016 is that it seems to have fired up Run the Jewels once more, helping the two rappers reach previously untouched heights.
RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding all accountable, and toppling oppression.
Mike and El-P are on the top of their game throughout RTJ3, tag-teaming seamlessly like Kanye and Jay(-)Z on “Otis” or Tyler, The Creator and Earl Sweatshirt on “AssMilk” – they hit verses back and forth as smoothly as a ball in a table tennis rally.
Run The Jewels 3 is the most practiced, polished, and ambitious project from Run The Jewels yet, without the loss of their self-made swagger.
Their third record, simply titled Run the Jewels 3, further expands the group’s punishing sound while remaining rooted in the unique alphabet that made them resonate in the first place.
I also think it’s better than the first or second installments: slightly more ambitious and slightly more layered.
The blessing and the curse of Run the Jewels 3 is that it’s still a Run the Jewels album, a promise that every song is good, nothing is bad, and depending on your mood you’ll either bask in the lack of tempo changes, pulchritudinous song structures, and surprising hooks, or you’ll seek out a more colorful record.
RTJ3 can safely, accurately, and comprehensively be described as “a third Run The Jewels album.” This is a good thing. The albums are differentiated from each other not by vast stylistic shifts but by highlights—a verse or a punchline or a particularly terse beat, all of which are present here.
RTJ 3 is both a sprinter’s dip and a victory lap – it is neither as sinewy as RTJ 1 nor as effusively vivacious as 2014’s RTJ 2, but still finds itself imbibed with the kind of assured professionalism that is only permitted to those who have previously done enough to be granted a low-pressure outing.
Run the Jewels can still detonate rhymes like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into a CVS, but now they're strategizing for the long war ahead.
The formula is probably becoming familiar, but its time is now.
This album is full of bangers and achieves what so many hip-hop heads, old and new, are longing for: music with a message, loud and clear.
Following RTJ2, this record is even harder, even darker and somehow even angrier.
Such complexities not only make RTJ3 the most accomplished chapter in the duo's trilogy of LPs, but will also leave fans eagerly awaiting the next installment in what's proving to be one of hip-hop's most boldly distinctive discographies.
Run the Jewels returns with their most politically charged effort yet.
RTJ3 ultimately mirrors the sentiment of too many movie franchise sequels that make the brand go stale.
Thankfully there’s enough gold at hand to excuse Run The Jewels for getting a little bit carried away with their own runaway success.
For the most part, Run the Jewels 3 is not intent on breaking new ground but rather on cementing the fruitful dynamic between El-P and Killer Mike.
Run the Jewels 3's status as a credible but not quite compelling call to arms serves as a reminder of how difficult hip-hop partnerships are to sustain and how much the genre relies on novelty and innovation.
#4 | / | Paste |
#7 | / | The Skinny |
#10 | / | Slant Magazine |
#16 | / | New York Daily News |
#19 | / | Earbuddy |
#19 | / | Treble |
#22 | / | Rough Trade |
#29 | / | Pitchfork |
#31 | / | Fopp |
#32 | / | The Alternative |