Sports & Leisure is the new project from producer Jeff Markey. Primarily an instrumental album, it also features artists billy woods, PremRock, Fatboi Sharif, Defcee, SKECH185, Googie & Shape. Markey started working on Sports & Leisure in 2021, as pandemic restrictions eased and a longterm relationship came to an end.

“I intentionally went back to basics a bit and made my life pretty simple. On my days off I would go to the courts and shoot, then walk to the record store and grab vinyl, then bring it home and rip samples while I smoked weed and watched sports,” Markey explains, “It was essentially that, playing Madden and working. It felt like just getting back to the things I had always loved most- Sports, weed and music”

Markey is a longtime Backwoodz collaborator but while his contributions have always been memorable, they have also been few and far between. The credits tell the tale; there he is producing the very first track- “Native Sun”- on Half Measures, the very first Armand Hammer mixtape (2013). That same year he did “Black Ark” on the duos debut LP, Race Music and then doesn’t pop again on anything Backwoodz related until 2019 when he co-produced billy woods first single for Terror Management, “Western Education is Forbidden” featuring Fielded. In 2022, Markey and Fielded made it 2-for-2 with the slinkily fun “Halloween Fell On A Weekend”, a track on Armand Hammer’s vinyl-exclusive WHT LBL.

While he has put out a few other projects over the years and has an equally long history with Reservoir Sound, the arts collective founded by producer A.M. Breakups, Markey spent most of the past decade on the periphery of the NYC indie scene, as likely to drop heat as he was to disappear for years at a time. Sports & Leisure represents the beginnings of a new era for the Akron-born producer who moved to New York City in 2004. The pandemic gave him the time and mental space to re-dedicate himself to music and, with more stuff coming in 2023, this project figures to be the tip of the iceberg.

“I wanted to make beats that were rugged yet had really warm textures. Previously, I had been making such complicated and left-field sounding shit that I wanted to make something closer to normal rap beats,” Jeff says, “I wanted to make shit that was special because good choices were made within an already existing framework rather than completely changing the framework”.