Photo courtesy of Carlo Liou
Twelve years after releasing their debut album the Chicago crew Tomorrow Kings is back. Each member has stayed busy since 2013 releasing solo projects and various group efforts (Jyroscope, War Church, VirgoTwins.) This time around, sans past group members Lamon Manuel, Wizard Jenkins the Great, and DJ Seanile, the now six-man squad reunited to make a timely album that speaks on our current tumultuous times called “SALT.”
SALT is a 13-track album produced entirely by Australian producer Aoi. The album comes to us courtesy of Buenaventura Records and features appearances by Defcee, D2G, Ava Moman, Brittany Townes, Jason Gatz, and Curly Castro.
The Real Hip-Hop spoke with four of the six members of Tomorrow Kings about their new album SALT, advancing their emcee abilities, working with Aoi, and their December 18, 2025 show at Schubas in Chicago.
TRHH: Why’d you title the new album SALT?
SKECH185: Good question. There were some things I was dealing with health wise that involved blood pressure and when I started talking to the crew about it “pressure” was one of the big things that kept coming up. One of the weirdest pieces of advice that I was given when I needed more advice was eat less salt. Salt just became this overarching thing. It’s something that you have to live, something that you need, something that you can’t live without, something that if you have too much of it destroys you, but if you have too little of it, it gives you the exact same issues.
Right now, we’re living in troubled times. We started writing this record fully in the summer of 2020. We always stay connected, but we’re like reconnecting in terms of getting verses and stuff like that done. With ambulance’s whizzing past us, cats getting killed, protests going on. We do underground rap — we’re political. We’ve been talking about this shit for a long time. It was a summer full of “I told you so’s” and it all just started to make sense as a title when we started piecing it all together.
I.B. Fokuz: I think it’s a lot of juxtapositions to it. I know Gile talked about some historical references and there’s so many angles you could go at. Just to emphasize what SKECH was saying, with salt it’s very historical with our people. That’s the flavor, right? We wanna have flavor and if it ain’t got salt it ain’t right. I think that we’ve always been about delivering the flavor, if you may, when it comes to the music and making sure that it’s at top standard to taste.
But also too I think with our maturity, and the density of the subject matters, and the things that we’re tackling in this project, it’s kind of like parallel to the point of you’ve been eating this flavor for so long and you realize what it’s doing to you. So, you start to understand I have to be more calculated in my intake and how I balance these things. I really think it’s a deep juxtaposition of what we bring to the table, but also what’s on the table and how we have to take responsibility for it.
TRHH: How did Aoi become the sole producer of the album?
SKECH185: He presented the beats. When we did RTM we actually got a remix from him and his production partner, DOS4GW. Except OS4GW did the beat and Aoi did the scratches. So, we’ve been familiar with him for like 13 years. And then when he came to New York where I live we built and did a couple shows. We started talking and he was like he wanted to do a record. We had already been talking about putting something together. I was just like, “Yo, my crew is trying to put something together.” He’s like, “All right, we’ll see what’s up.” When we started just going through the beats it just started making sense. At one point we had the beats and it just seemed like he was the guy who understood what we were doing.
Collasoul Structure: He also hit us with a barrage of beats too! It was a bunch. It was a bundle. And they all really just fit our ethos. We always want to do something a little bit hardcore, a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more industrial. All the beats in his wheelhouse all seemed to fit that mold.
Gilead7: That’s the thing about TK too, at one time it was nine of us, now there’s six of us. There were between like seven and six emcees, there’s six now. We all were individual artists so we came together after already having been the solo artists who had different things that we did in terms of beat selections, but there was something that held it all together. I think what Aoi symbolizes for us is somebody who gave us a sound that pulled the resonances out of all of our sonic tastes in beats. And not just beats, but production. Because Aoi didn’t just give a beat, he produced this record. When it’s TK we’re all here and we all emerge kind of like the title emerged from the record. With the beat selection everybody was on the same page, and that’s kind of what happened.
TRHH: How have you changed as a crew since Nigger Rigged Time Machine?
Collasoul Structure: Oh man, so many aspects of our lives have changed. I.B. at the time he had his first daughter. It was before NRTM I want to say.
I.B. Fokuz: Basically, I had my daughter the same year TK got together, which was awesome.
Collasoul Structure: So, that means she was about 6 when the record came out.
I.B. Fokuz: And now I’ve got five and he got a daughter…
Collasoul Structure: I got one now. She’s 10 now.
I.B. Fokuz: Other brothers not on the call they got children as well, so we’ve grown as men. That’s one of the biggest things that has changed. Not to say we wasn’t men at that time, but I think we was a little reckless at that time, to say the least. I think that we’ve matured, I think that our pen has matured, our ears and sonically we’ve matured. I think you know that also goes with perspective as well, just like what our view is on the world. I know we’ve all kind of grown in the layers of who we are, too.
Just our personalities and elevating our intelligence and how we view the world, how we view ourselves, and how we view each other. But the interesting part is that we’ve grown and expanded geographical regions. SKECH is in New York, Gilead is in Tijuana, Mexico to California to Minnesota, Malakh is in Atlanta, IL. Subliminal is in D.C. Us being in these different areas yet still staying connected, we’ve grown a lot in many ways, but we’ve also grown closer through the times.
SKECH185: And our abilities became more masterful, to be honest. If you would have just listened to NRTM to now, we were dope back then, but we’ve become even more capable emcees. There are just things that we did on this record in terms of technique that we didn’t do before, let alone perspective.
Gilead7: Yeah and I always praise the Lord when someone says the title. When someone says “Nigger Rigged Time Machine” there’s a certain power with the title, so I thank you Sherron for saying that.
TRHH: [Laughs] You’re welcome.
Gilead7: I appreciate that. I think in terms of what we do on this record I think Nigger Rigged Time Machine kind of scratched the surface of it. It was us kind of being satirical and kind of really just writing what came to our head, which what SKECH said is dope. But what happens when you harness electricity? I think that’s what SALT is. I mean, much of the subject matter is kind of the same, but the ways in which they’re articulated I think this lends itself more to the lyric book that’s in the SALT vinyl. What did Mos Def say or Yasiin now? “You could play us and repeat us/And then take us home and read us.” You could do that with Nigger Rigged Time Machine, but you really could do it with SALT.
TRHH: On the song “Regicide” Collasoul says, “I’m saying not everybody’s a fascist pig/Also saying no one was ever born a bigot asshole kid” My question is, is it even possible to stop people from raising bigot asshole kids?
Collasoul Structure: Man, I would like to be as hopeful as possible sometimes. But racism is such an unrelenting thing, and it’s everywhere, and it’s just so constant it lives and breathes. I don’t think we’ll ever wake up in a world where it’s just over and everybody’s like, “You know what? You’re OK, man! Your culture is OK, the way you look is OK.” I want to be hopeful about it, I really do. I don’t wanna just completely destroy everyone’s hopes and dreams of a better world, but the work really would have to be done. I don’t think so much needs to be done on our side. There are things that we can do, but it’s not really just us [laughs]. Maybe one day, huh? When our kids’ kids are adults maybe that change will walk the earth, I don’t know.
TRHH: It’s not looking like it [laughs]. It’s looking like it’s going the opposite way.
Collasoul Structure: Yeah.
TRHH: SKECH, your verse on “The News” hit home with me from the comic book line, to feeling isolation. Are you at a point in your life now where you feel like you belong?
SKECH185: You know what? Now, yes. Definitely and thank you for that. It’s interesting because I will say I’ve reached that point a long while ago. It took a long time to get there. That verse was pretty serious to me because it’s an attack on a lot of things, but it’s really an indictment to a lot of my family. It was more normal to sell drugs than it was to go to art school. People knew how to handle going to jail, they didn’t know how to handle going to college. I guess one thing that my mom taught me to do, which I always appreciated, was to say “fuck ’em” even if they’re relatives. I love my auntie, but she ain’t shit. I’ll be at her birthday party because I gotta be, but I understand her heart.
I understand you can’t change them, but you don’t have to. They never show up when you need them, so you don’t have to really worry about them, you just got to be related to them. If my family heard it this would hurt them, and I’d be OK with that. That’s kind of what happens when you develop that. We grew up buying comic books from newspaper stands down the street from people selling crack. These are things we have to walk with, and in which case, yeah, you see the hypocrisy or you see the cognitive dissonance. When I finally learned how to identify that I developed peace with it.
TRHH: I’m from the west side. I never felt like I belonged. I played Nintendo and I watched wrestling, that was my life.
Collasoul Structure: Same.
TRHH: OK! That was what I did and nobody else was doing that. I was by myself. I got a brother and a sister, but I was pretty much by myself…
SKECH185: Yeah, definitely. When I was young we moved from the projects to California, for reasons I won’t go into, but because I was in California for the time I was there when I came back I didn’t have the Chicago accent like everybody else because I was in Southern California. So, there were just certain things that kind of changed, and there’s certain things that never came back either. One thing I had to get used to very early was grown people talking to me making me feel weird about speaking English correctly. Keep in mind, these the same niggas that had us read Martin Luther King as children. So, we were taught intelligent shit very early and how to read very clear, cogent, and incredible thought, but it was weird when we spoke like that. The cognitive dissonance that comes with all that has always been something that was there for me. I definitely wanted to throw it in that verse.
TRHH: You guys have a show on December 18th at Schubas in Chicago; what do you have in-store for fans that come to the show?
SKECH185: Ooh, it’s gonna be madness because we gonna do the record, but we’re going to do a lot of records. It’s going to be a lot of rap, I’ll say that.
Collasoul Structure: A whole lot of new, that’s for sure. A whole lot of new, a whole lot of SALT. We’re going to do some NRT, and we have to, I feel like it just has to happen. A nice mix of stuff and we’re like super pumped to have The Opus on the show — absolute Chicago and otherworldly legends. And our good little brother Defcee, who’s an incredible emcee. He’s incredibly consistent right now.
SKECH185: And he’s on our album. It’s going to be dope. We’re still putting the set together, but it’s going to be pretty crazy. Trying to bring some of the old Tomorrow Kings energy that we always bring when we get together.
I.B. Fokuz: I think The Opus too is going to bring a necessary pulse. Obviously, we appreciate Opus when they were present at their shows when we went to them, but I think it’s going to bring a necessary pulse because we all got tired of the rapping hootenanny’s. You could get drained from that. I think that this night is going to be really special because you’re going to get a fantastic emcee by Defcee, but you’re also going to get this breather of cinematic fusion with Opus to bridge to Tomorrow Kings. So, I think it’s going to be an experience. I just foresee and know that all of the heads that need to be in that place is going to be in there, along with the fans and with people probably traveling into the city to be there. So, it’s definitely going to be a night to remember just for the history books.
Gilead7: It’s genealogy. This is a word that I’ve been thinking about in my philosophical work a lot recently, but really in terms of this show. This must have been like 01 or 02, I was at HPK and I had been a fan of The Opus. I finally met Fanum, or Mr. Echoes, and I was like, “Whoa, this is the cat right here!” And unlike a lot of people in the scene at that time, at least in terms of their relation to me, he was so cordial, he was so encouraging, all of that. Then for him to even tell us that he sees us like a junior Rubberoom years later when we formed as a crew! I had been talking to him for years, just like throwing him different things he’s like, “Man, this is dope, keep doing it,” or “You could be stronger here, there, but keep doing what you’re doing.”
We have the same relationship in some way with Defcee who came up listening to us and being around us. I did a show for my record The Darkroom in like ‘06 I want to say, and Defcee was at the show. I believe he bought a copy of the record from me at that show at the Urban Sandbox, for those of y’all who know what that is, shout out to Sully and everybody who was involved in that. But it’s genealogy and now I see what Defcee is doing. We just want this thing to pass down, pass down, pass down. Keep going. Shout out to the homie Thaione Davis, he always said, “Whatever you do, leave legacy and give back,” and I think that’s what this is.
TRHH: Who is the SALT album made for?
Gilead7: Us!
Collasoul Structure: Literally us [laughs]. You, me, SKECH, Gilead, I.B., Malakh, IL. Subliminal, yeah, everybody.
SKECH185: For me, honestly, man, That’s the real answer. One thing that makes Tomorrow Kings very, very important to me is that we kind of represented and tapped into an under-served voice of rap in Chicago. When we talk about Rubberoom, Rubberoom was honestly kind of a standalone group when you line them up with everybody of their generation. In a lot of respects there were certain people that fit in, but not enough. They didn’t get championed enough. We look at them as an exception, but we were kind of those guys. We make music for people who are intelligent, but also aggressive, who don’t take shit, but also are gentle, black men going through this world who read comic books and dealt with violence, who seen spaceships and pyramids. This is for our community — for our people.
I.B. Fokuz: I think it’s funny when you asked that question and the first answer that came in my head is that, “This is for everybody that likes salt.”
Collasoul Structure: [Laughs] Yeah, actually.
SKECH185: That’s good!
Gilead7: Yeah, I like it. I mean I’ll add on to what’s already been so profound and wonderfully said, art’s a mirror and I think that’s one of the things that brought us together as TK. We all saw art as a mirror. We do this for us. We do this because we’re trying to externalize ourselves on a record, and if you like it, cool, if not, that’s fine, too. I think there’s something powerful about how after all these years, No Brands. It’s always been No Brands it’s still No Brands. We just kind of told you that in maybe no uncertain terms because that’s what that song is. But those who like it, it’s a bonus, and we’re glad that people seem to enjoy it.
I.B. Fokuz: I mean, who makes titles like “Art Rap to Make Babies To”? There’s No Brands, man. Who makes a song called “Featuring Lil Wayne”? that’s No Brands. Who makes “Another Wu-Tang Comparison”? That’s No Brands. “Sell Coke To White Folks” that’s No Brands.
Collasoul Structure: “Barbarian Butter” only us [laughs].
Purchase: Tomorrow Kings – SALT