Here at Janky Smooth, Friday’s are for nerding out on new releases. This week, we dive deep into new music from Nas and DJ Premier VS Danny L Harle w/ Rachika Nayar-artists that are rarely mentioned side by side. In contrast to the two reviewing them, Rob Shepyer and Danny Ryan should ALWAYS be side by side- especially when discussing new music.
Nas and DJ Premier: Light-Years (released December 12, 2025): Mass Appeal
Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones aka Nas is one of hip hop’s most legendary and authentic children. His seminal album Illmatic still slaps, sounding like it was recorded in ancient history, 1994, yet carrying forward through time like a hip hop heirloom. Something passed down from generation to generation, almost like an oral bible or a survival guide to help people endure the insanity that is New York City. Illmatic remains true so long as New York remains chaotic, and as America’s greatest city, neither will ever change whether it is Giuliani or Mamdani as mayor.
This is 2025 though, and Nas’ relevancy far surpasses his classic efforts. When paired with producers from newer generations he inspired, Nas shines to new audiences that may not have been down for the first wave of music. Take his 2018 album NASIR produced by Kanye West, a brilliant album of seven songs that bring new spiritual depth in a time when everyone in hip hop tried sounding the same.
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Today though, Nas is collaborating with a producer from his own golden age. The one and only DJ Premier, the man behind Gang Starr, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Jadakiss’ Kiss the Game Goodbye, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, and of course Illmatic. The newest release from this dynamic duo is Light-Years, out today December 12th 2025.
Dropping the needle on this album, the first track “My Life Is Real” gives you that New York luxury vibe right off the jump. Elegant pianos play the city’s pain, taking you through a day in the life of a hip hop legend and all the trauma that runs through the mind of a man who surpassed so many contemporaries. When it comes to reviewing hip hop, you measure the greatness in bars:
“Look at us now, De La, Mobb, Rae, Ghost, and Rick
Big up Big L, Prodigy, Trugoy, they live
Martyrs, if you will, a Legend Has It cartel”
Nas is not just giving listeners a confessional with this new album, he is paying tribute to all the peers that made his life so rich. And the album indeed sounds rich, with funky beats that keep you moving.
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“GiT Ready” lays down Nas’ hip hop gangster credentials for a new era of gangster where wealth is measured in crypto and relevancy. “NY State of Mind Pt. 3” begins with a Billy Joel sample from New York State of Mind. Flipped onto its dark side, Nas celebrates the city and uplifts the unseen corners of the city from Rikers Island to underground art scenes. The delicate balance between luxury and grit is a constant theme that runs into the next track, “Welcome to the Underground,” where a blues rock beat takes the album in a raw lyrical direction:
“Dig up dirt, termites and baby mice
Scattering below the surface
We deep in the soil, we jackhammerin to the core of it all
Avoiding the laws, outside the cornerstores with the raw”
On “Madman” the track opens with a quote saying that what the new generation of hip hop music is characterized by is respect, whereas before it was “***** music.” This is the kind of moody psychological beat I love to hear, the mind of a serial killer on wax. Only here, the only murder is in the booth where Nas uses his words like a knife with surgical precision.
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“Pause Tapes” highlights the producing genius of DJ Premier, looping samples to carry Nas’ rhymes to a new funky, hypnotic place. This track puts listeners into a strange state of mind, under total control of the album:
“That is when I had an epiphany, came with last on the symphony
If I could set a pose cut off, that be my entry”
This song is about how a man becomes an artist, taking that first step into the great unknown of a creative adventure. It is an ode to hip hop itself, a sonic sacrifice set before the house of hip hop.
Giving us another dimension to the same artists, the song “Writers” has a space vibe to it, with science fiction synths peeking under rhymes that heighten the act of graffiti into some kind of cosmic battle for good and evil.
“Sons” is an inspirational song about fatherhood and parenting a son. It shows how a hip hop gangster can reveal his sensitive side and let us into his most personal truths, caring about the next generation. Looking into his past to reflect on moments he spent with his mother growing up, this song gives power to anyone raising a boy.
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Using a sample from Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” “It’s Time” slips into the future with a very hard picture of the present. Keeping your eyes on the clock is a waste. This song refocuses the listener on their present, so they act on their dreams and beat the evolutionary rat race.
“Nasty Esco Nasir” is a vintage futurist beat where Nas can spit his most venomous ammunition. Each name; Nasty, Esco, or Nasir, represents another side of Nas, each one delivering different kinds of hip hop both sonically and lyrically. “My Story Your Story” is a duet with AZ where each lyricist presents their bar with so much impact it feels like a flex, and together they illustrate the many scenes that occur in the life of a hip hop legend, weaving a narrative you cannot look away from.
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“Bouquet (To The Ladies)” is a tribute to all the women of hip hop, from the mothers to the artists. Nas name drops all his sheroes and makes it known these women were not only beautiful, feminine, and brilliant, they were straight killers on the mic. While celebrating the divine feminine, Nas knows how to remain masculine in his love letter.
“Junkie” has a sad string-based beat that sounds like a requiem when paired with lyrics about the pain of addiction. Only this addiction is not to drugs, it is to hip hop, a substance that can make someone fall just like any obsession can. A self-proclaimed hip hop junkie, Nas says he needs it in his arteries.
“Shine Together” brings Notorious B I G back from the grave in its sampling, with a beautiful beat that sounds oriental at times. The piano flourishes like the lyrics do, giving the words a more musical and less literary quality that tranquilizes and enchants the listener.
The last song on the album, “3rd Childhood,” shows how lasting hip hop is no matter how time moves on. Naming all the things that remained constant in the changing world, it reminds us that some things are simply too stubborn to change and thank God for that stubbornness. Hip hop is stubborn, staying true thanks to artists like Nas when it was challenged by autotune, artificial intelligence, and whatever other distractions tried taking it off course from remaining the realest art form under the sun.
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Light-Years does everything a great hip hop album should. It celebrates the form, reflects on the past, gives listeners a profound picture of the present, redefines the gangster for the context in which the track was laid down, and reestablishes the artist as a dominant force no matter what the world looks like or changes into. Nas and DJ Premier are a proven recipe to make lasting hip hop music and all it takes is two simple ingredients.
Danny L Harle w/ Rachika Nayar: Azimuth Divergence (released December 11, 2025): XL Recordings
It’s incredibly surprising how many notable ambient releases that we’re receiving in the end of 2025, with Oneohtrix Point Never’s recent masterpiece Tranquilizer unexpectedly being much more ambient than the rest of his discography from the past decade and ending up as one of my top albums of the year. This week I was even more surprised to see PC Music alumni and hyperpop royalty Danny L Harle dip his toes into the genre on his newest collaborative release Azimuth Divergence with experimental ambient artist Rachika Nayar, especially considering he has a major pop release scheduled for the beginning of 2026.
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Danny L Harle has experimented with genres all over the place, from his happy-hardcore project Harlecore on Diplo’s record label Mad Decent to being Caroline Polachek’s current producer; and I just learned this last week that he had even collaborated on Dua Lipa’s biggest single “Houdini” with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. With a production pedigree like this, ambient music is the perfect fit for a side-release EP to show off the spectrum of sound that he works with; I’m just blown away that JankySmooth is reviewing two ambient releases in the same month with how inconsistently we receive new music in this genre from major artists.
One of the key misunderstandings that people make about ambient music is associating it with “music to sleep to”, considering how often the genre does fall into that description. While almost all music that you fall asleep to is ambient, you can’t fall asleep to all ambient music. This newest Danny L Harle and Rachika Nayar EP displays a perfect example of this distinction with its use of atmosphere and tone to create soundscapes that can instantly be visualized mentally, but creating much more intense dream-states than something that could lull you to sleep. This release definitely falls more in the category of ambient music that has more than enough stimulation to keep you focused while you play it in the background while working on a major project.
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While I have previously compared the atmosphere of Oneohtrix Point Never’s tones to being stuck in a Sega Dreamcast menu, this album resembles much more of a “Castaway” environment. While it is a very personal and tranquil experience, it does have enough moments of thoughtfully structured chaos to inspire immediate action in the listener. The island you’re stuck on might be peaceful, but you still need to get the hell off of it as soon as possible. Danny L Harle’s past works in the happy hardcore and hyperpop genres make these more hyperactive and anxious sounds of the release sound incredibly natural though, making you feel as if you were born to take on this adventure and you are prepared with all of the tools to do so. This might sound like an insanely personal interpretation, but considering track names like “No Hope”, “Meridian”, “A Broken Screen”, and “Ask The Waves”; this seems to be the exact image that Danny L Harle and Rachika Nayar want to create in your mind.
The EP starts off in a very tranquil but isolating tone, as the opening track “Ask The Rain” begins with the sound of a cassette tape being inserted as a lo-fi guitar riff slowly creates a void that consumes the listener. While this release does feel like being deserted on an isolated island, this would be the absolute worst song to listen to in that situation with how haunting and lonely its atmospheric mood is.
While most ambient releases feel as if they could be one long track, Danny L Harle has a genius method of incorporating his more contrasting rave-sounding electronic synths to the beginning of each track as the jarring change lets you know the next song is starting. The songs do still blend together into one cohesive story, but Danny L Harle comes from a world of creating pop music singles rather than the typical electronic artist’s nature of performing one-track DJ sets; he wants these songs to stand out from each other. Even in an ambient setting, his personality still shines through; which is incredibly hard to do in this genre.
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The haunting distant setting of the EP continues into “Stellar Parallax” featuring Caroline Polachek and while I couldn’t really find her in the track too much, her long siren-sounding wail in the vocal sample throughout is indistinguishable from anyone else. The use of guitars at the end of this song and later in “222/33946” are incredibly innovative as this instrument isn’t typically used in most ambient or experimental music overall, but Danny L Harle and Rachika Nayar are knowledgeable enough in production and sound-design to know how truly haunting and lonely a guitar tone can be. Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain comes to mind when trying to think of another example, but there aren’t many. Incorporating guitar into this release comes from a deep love for experimental music as a whole, rather than just the electronic elements of it.
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The mind-provoking hyperactive synth notes that open the track “A Broken Screen” mark a shift in the album from a more tranquil atmosphere to a much more chaotic and anxious mood. It resembles the moment in this story where the listener is no longer phased by the isolation and fear of being stuck on an island, as they need to focus solely on survival if they’re going to ever make it back home. The hyperpop and happy-hardcore elements of Danny L Harle are on full display in the second half of the track, as spiraling high-pitched synthesizers take over at moments only to fade away into the background again. The album’s tranquil nature is still looming throughout the rest of the album, but sticking more strictly to the “ambient genre” is thrown out the window.
“Fucking Instrument” almost steps away from the ambient genre entirely, as its pianos and vocal samples could almost resemble a fucked-up Owl City song with how bright and in-your-face they are. These tones of poppy bliss that the track creates may step away from the genre, but they don’t step away from the album’s overall narrative at all. What previously felt as a familiar-sounding break from the album’s more ambient tone begins to turn on the listener, as these sounds keep compounding on each other faster and faster until they reach a massive explosion of noise and piercing tones for the second half of the song.
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For pop-enthusiasts that were waiting for a break from the ambient nature of the EP and hoping Danny L Harle would deliver one of the high-octane club bangers that he’s known for, the overwhelming scrambled chaos that this track ends up delivering will make them wish they were back lounging peacefully in the more peaceful ambient tones of the release. While Danny L Harle loves to experiment with the darker sides of electronic music to create uncomfortable moments in his pop tracks, it’s absolutely terrifying when he does so in the isolating loneliness of an ambient environment rather than in a club setting.
The finale track “Ask The Waves” returns to the guitar riff of “Ask The Rain” from the opening, bringing everything together as some of the more chaotic hyperactive synths fade away completely. While there is the unsettling psychedelic fear of looping back to where you first started, the song becomes incredibly quiet halfway through before a massive wall of noise cuts through the silence and the familiar guitar riff enters with a much more hopeful, open tone.
While “Ask The Rain” had the listener feeling an existential dread before diving into the rest of the EP, “Ask The Waves” creates a sense of excitement and opportunity to leave you with; You are finally on a ship back home after being abandoned on that island for days. The unsettling moments of the release were well worth it, as the EP ends with the feeling of having just conquered a massive personal battle before throwing you back into reality. The whole experience really does feel like you are finally returning after living in a completely different world for a moment, which is what all amazing ambient music should set out to do.
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While I don’t believe Danny L Harle is going to suddenly become an ambient artist over night, I would absolutely love to see more works like this from him in the future. Between this release and the more tranquil soundscapes he creates on Caroline Polachek’s albums, it’s clear that he’s an absolute mastermind in producing more experimentally soft forms of music.
Regardless; his pop and electronic productions do still have these levels of experimentation in the darker, heavier elements he adds to them and judging by the collaborative tracks with Caroline Polachek and PinkPantheress released from his upcoming album Cerulean, the soundscapes are about to be even more surprising and diverse than anyone could have possibly expected. While this collaborative EP with Rachika Nayar probably won’t receive as much mainstream attention, it’s an insane move for Danny L Harle to give us a look into this alternate universe where he’s a bit more esoteric in his experimentations of sound. It’s proof that the darkest and craziest music can still come from the most surprising places if you know where to look for it.
Nas review by Rob Shepyer
Danny L Harle and Rachika Nayar review by Danny Ryan
