Rap music from the near and bleak future; or more aptly, from next week’s dystopia. Artería Verité is a concept album that ended up being more future-realist than conceptual.

While on tour two years ago, the newly formed AIR CREDITS— Chicago rapper ShowYouSuck and producer Steve Reidell of The Hood Internet— came by the Minneapolis studio of SIMS (Doomtree, Shredders) to collaborate for the first Air Credits album Broadcasted. Sims then took Air Credits on tour in support of his 2016 album More Than Ever, largely produced by Minneapolis artist ICETEP. Immediately following that tour, these four met up in the studio (first in Chicago, then later in Minneapolis) to create Artería Verité.

Sims and ShowYouSuck handle the raps, pulp-driven snapshots from the wasteland and its inhabitants, their means for survival, their need to commune, their arterial link to one another through underground channels of communique. ICETEP and Reidell handle the production, sweeping synths over a vascular pulsing of low frequencies creating a tension, like a machine seeing its own blood. The songs speak to our baser needs to find each other, especially when in the shit.