Ireland’s finest rap group Rusangano Family raise the bar with their new album Let The Dead Bury The Dead coming out on Friday April 8th.
After working closely together over the last couple of years, West Ireland-based God Knows, MuRli and mynameisjOhn, 2 MCs and 1 DJ, came together as the Rusangano Family in 2015. Since then, the Limerick-based trio has steadily built their own unique brand of dynamic bass-led music. Previous releases like the Rusangano / Family album (2014) and Surface Tension EP (2015) have led to support slots with Run The Jewels, Young Fathers, Snoop Dogg, BadBadNotGood and accolades from Nialler9, The Irish Times, OkayAfrica and Pitchfork.
Wearing their hip-hop and electronic influences proudly on their sleeves, Rusangano Family celebrate their diverse backgrounds (Ireland, Zimbabwe, Togo) and, as Pitchfork writer Dean Van Nguyen describes it, have more than any other Irish rap collective explored “their African roots, sewing highlife guitars, triumphant horns, and rattling percussion into their tracks”.
Recording and producing their debut album in Limerick and Clare throughout the latter half of 2015, Rusangano Family gained further international attention with the release of Heathrow, the first single from Let the Dead Bury The Dead. The track is a vivid depiction of the struggles of a migrant’s journey and the cultural barriers that await them in foreign lands. Heathrow was featured extensively on the website NPR, noting how “God Knows and MuRli’s observations are full of the resilience of shattered dreams; mynameisjOhn’s backdrop sounds like the boots doing the shattering. It’s a timely combination that tries to makes sense of heady issue by focusing on the human aspects of migration”.
After a successful appearance at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March, the group is now debuting Let the Dead Bury the Dead and touring the country.
Rusangano Family tour dates:
8/04: The Kino, Cork
9/04: The Sugar Club, Dublin
22/04: Dolans, Limerick
23/04: De Barras, Clonakilty
Click here to listen to the album
On June 2nd Rusangano Family will be at Ormston House, Limerick to share the creative process involved in the writing, recording and producing of their new album. This informal creative workshop is part of the Murder Machine project curated by Christine Eyene in the context of EVA International Federation of arts organisations and institutions responding to the curatorial concept of Ireland’s Biennial 2016: Still (the) Barbarians.
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