Shabazz Palaces released It’s a Style Sport on October 23, 2026 through Sub Pop, the eighth studio album from Ishmael Butler’s experimental hip hop project. The Shabazz Palaces It’s a Style Sport album runs 10 tracks and 39 minutes, co-produced by Butler and Erik Blood and announced on August 11 alongside its first single, Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet).
A tracklist built like a live band record
The It’s a Style Sport tracklist is compact: Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet), Field Notes, Show Me Missouri In Mink, Jheri Curl Jump, Deadstock Dude, Tongue In Chic, Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M., Olivia According To Touch, Money Can’t Save Your Mind and From One Future To Another. Three of those songs carried the rollout. Ahh World arrived with the August announcement and a visualizer, Jheri Curl Jump followed in September, and Tongue In Chic landed on October 1, a New Wave and R&B leaning single that showed the album’s playful side weeks before release.
The way the album was made explains how it sounds. Butler built the record from jam sessions, bringing musicians skeletal structures and playing until the music locked into place, then constructing the final recordings from drum machines, bass stabs and keys. The guest list is a band, not a feature sheet: Marquetta Miller, Thaddeus Turner, Evan Flory-Barnes, Gerald Turner, Kassa Overall and Carlos Overall all play on the record, which was cut at Circular Ruin Studios in Brooklyn, Lake View Studios and Seattle’s Hall of Justice Studios, mixed by Erik Blood and mastered by Warren Defever at Third Man Mastering in Detroit. Sub Pop’s own description of the finished album is direct.
It’s a Style Sport is a bold, forthright, and heavy-hitting album.
Butler’s long arc, from Digable Planets to here
Ishmael Butler has been bending hip hop’s shape for more than thirty years. As Butterfly in Digable Planets, he won a Grammy and helped prove in the early nineties that jazz rap could be both cool and commercial. Shabazz Palaces, launched with the landmark Black Up in 2011, took the experimentation further out: psychedelic, electronic, and deliberately hard to file. It’s a Style Sport is the project’s eighth album and its first full-length statement since the sibling releases Robed in Rareness in 2023 and Exotic Birds of Prey in 2024.
What has changed across those records is the temperature. The new album finds Butler reflective, narrating his own rise on Ahh World in a booming third person voice and turning Tongue In Chic into a comic dating story over an eighties Minneapolis groove. The experimentation is still the baseline. It is simply warmer now, the work of an artist compiling what a long career taught him into songs that move like a live band because, this time, that is mostly how they were born.
Where It’s a Style Sport lands
Experimental rap can be an endurance test, and the most common praise for this album, from Bandcamp Daily’s album of the day nod to HotNewHipHop’s release coverage, is that it never becomes one: ten tracks, no wasted space, ideas everywhere and a groove holding the door open. For listeners who know Butler only through Digable Planets, It’s a Style Sport is the most welcoming door back into his catalogue in years. For longtime Shabazz Palaces listeners, it is proof that the project’s future tense still works, fifteen years after Black Up first bent the timeline.
Two singles tell the album’s story
Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet) works as the album’s thesis statement. Butler narrates his younger self in the third person, from a vantage point Bandcamp Daily described as a distant transmission, sorting a life into the three interests that formed him: music, street life and sports. The former college basketball player’s mantra, only shooters score, doubles as a summary of his whole career: take the shot nobody else sees. Tongue In Chic pulls the opposite lever. Over a groove that recalls Prince and the Minneapolis sound, Butler tells a dating story that keeps collapsing, including a chef who owns no utensils and keeps a messy kitchen, and plays the whole thing for warmth rather than edge. An album that can hold both of those songs, the manifesto and the comedy, in ten tracks is an album that knows exactly what it is.
It’s a Style Sport is streaming now on all platforms through Sub Pop. Start with Ahh World for the thesis, Tongue In Chic for the smile, and Jheri Curl Jump for the bounce, then take the full 39 minutes in order.
