The AV Club interviewed Slug from Atmosphere a while back. He spent a good amount of the interview lamenting over the time his past alcoholism and drug use took from him; how he could have been more productive and maybe less of a dick. That might be the case, but I wonder if Atmosphere would have been as successful with cool, sober hands behind the wheel. The group traffics in the kind of bitter, over-partied lyrics that everyone can relate to, but few could produce. I don't mean to downplay the breadth of the their catalogue or their very notable and noteworthy maturation, but this is a group that released pissed off voicemail messages from women formerly involved with Slug as an entire track on one of their full length albums. That is not something you'd see from most other hip-hop acts.

"Shoes" is off their album Seven's Travels and it does a great job of capturing everything that makes Atmosphere great and everything that occasionally makes me shudder. Oh yeah, and it has a sick beat.