NEW MUSIC | UK PRODUCER VICE BEATS DROPS ‘TORN LIGAMENT’ FT. NAPOLEON DA LEGEND AND 5STYLEZ

Torn Lig­a­ment was cre­ated by Vice beats dur­ing the lock­down peri­od of Cov­id-19 along­side the tal­en­ted Brook­lyn based word­smith Napo­leon Da Legend, who as ever paints pic­tures with his words, cre­at­ing a poignant tale of how a lady from his block made him reflect on his own life and jour­ney, broken dreams with Bas­ket­ball and more-so, the chal­lenges faced as a black man in a world of sup­pres­sion and inher­ent racism whilst stay­ing pos­it­ive and focused on pro­gres­sion.

The track is timely to say the least, with the top­ics raised by Napo­leon in his second verse link­ing dir­ectly to the points being made in the cur­rent Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment which is made all the more power­ful by the a cap­pella moment at the start of NDL’s words. Speak­ing from per­son­al exper­i­ence and as always hon­est and lyr­ic­ally on point, the fusion of beat and rhyme is per­fectly inter­twined in this soul­ful head nod­der.

Torn Lig­a­ment comes off the back of Vice beats’ highly praised offi­cial J Dilla trib­ute album — Dilla: The Time­less Trib­ute.

The Bris­tol, UK based pro­du­cer has worked with a pleth­ora of artists includ­ing Bro­therman, Pan­acea (Rawkus), Replife, Great Scott, and shared stages with the likes of Speech Debelle, Lazy Habits, Paper Tiger, and Smoove & Tur­rell to name but a few.

Napo­leon Da Legend has received major crit­ic­al acclaim and sup­port over the last few years from the likes of Statik Selektah, Sway and Tony Touch in addi­tion to highly suc­cess­ful US and European tours. Adding to the nar­rat­ive with scratches on the hook is Bris­tol based DJ 5Stylez, the founder of Scratch Pro Audio and co-host of Don’t Sleep Radio who, along­side Vice beats and NDL helps to paint a clear and thought pro­vok­ing pic­ture.

The graph­ics were cre­ated by French artist Simon Vergely from Sic Film. Vice beats has recently col­lab­or­ated with the tal­en­ted design­er on the graph­ics for his latest pod­cast series — Dig­gin’ The Crates, in which Vice beat’s inter­views a wide array of respec­ted musi­cians and lead­ers in the scene includ­ing Romesh Ran­gan­ath­an, Chali 2na, Damu The Fudgemunk, Mar­ley Marl and more.

Torn Lig­a­ment will be avail­able via Band­camp and all stream­ing plat­forms from the 22^nd June, with all pro­ceeds raised being donated to Reclaim The Block, the Min­neapol­is based char­ity, formed in 2018 who are try­ing to cre­ate fair­ness and equal­ity through com­munity action and aware­ness along­side edu­ca­tion­al tools and resources. To find out more, go to — www.reclaimtheblock.org/