Album Review: Spit Syndicate - One Good Shirt Had Us All Fly

Four albums in, the question we must ask ourselves as Spit Syndicate listeners is: "What does this new record have that we haven't seen or heard before?"

It's a stern test. Luckily, our hosts nail it with this accomplished, innovative and mature slice of Australian rap.

Mum, aptly named, is the album's biggest gamble: an admirable, sweet, brutally direct love letter to our duo's mothers. Know Better bangs. It stands alongside Hold On Me as a sign of the growing confidence Nick Lupi and Jimmy Nice have making hypnotic dance records with a couple rap verses thrown on top. Not In My Name is an eloquent war cry in the name of informed resistance.

Often, familiarity breeds contempt. The triumph of this record is that Nick Lupi and Jimmy Nice have confronted their legacy and arrived with a product that shines as bright as its predecessors. Here Nice brags, "No one else on my wave, I'm Kelly Slater", perhaps a spiritual successor to his near ten-year-old claim that he and his partner were winners "like a Pat Cash backhand slice". This sense of nostalgia (the title itself is a throwback) mixed with an increasingly genre-bending aesthetic makes this genuinely new and exciting.