Jak Progresso – Punches Pilot

( Produced and Performed by Jak Progresso, 2018)

As gritty, vile, and vulgar as any rapper you’ll ever hear, New York battle legend Jak Progresso aka Jak Tripper is a legend in the underground scene. On his 2020 album Punches Pilot, Progresso is in top form. Tripper made a career slinking and shirking around subway station corridors, dark alleyways, and cement basements, where you’d find him working himself into a psychotic dervish trance before spewing acid rap and eroding away his victims. Owing his unique voice to the kind of lacerated vocal chords only attained through hard living, gutbucket whiskey, and incessant sherm smoking, Jak’s rhymes are drenched with ultra-violent, ultra-visceral imagery and hazy late night B-film horror tropes. And as a producer, Tripper’s sound is influenced by the grimy Shaolin-style of early 90’s NY, with eerie string slashes and menacing, murky drums, all lending themselves perfectly to his brutal punchline repertoire.