Cheat Codes Tracklist
Cheat Codes is the first collaborative album between the musician and producer Danger Mouse and the MC Black Thought, released on August 12, 2022. The LP comes three years after Burton’s previous joint project – Lux Prima, with Karen O – and two years after Trotter’s previous project, the third installment of his Streams of Thought album series.
The joint album was heavily anticipated by the artists' respective fan-bases, having been in the works for several years before its eventual release. During an interview for NME, the duo explained that they started working together as soon as they met each other in 2006, but then had to repeatedly push the project back for at least a decade, due to the progression of their respective careers. They finally came back to work together between 2017 and 2018, as they scrapped most of their original material to work on an entirely new album, and developed an even tighter creative partnership, as Black Thought stated:
Over time, we’ve become really efficient: we’ve learned the ways in which we’re able to best complement each other. You communicate better when you know you’re not gonna mess up the relationship or that someone’s gonna get upset. Sometimes there’s so much ego involved that you almost have to walk on eggshells, because you don’t know how far you can go before the other person gets offended. It’s good to be able to tell it like it is.
As the Philadelphia native then added later in the same interview, the duo actually completed most of the album in 2020, during the lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as they were able to work on each song with more focus and care than ever before:
I don’t think there’s anything on Cheat Codes that was a first draft. Everything was made a little bit better and refined, down to where I take a breath or the annunciation of a specific syllable. The amount of attention to detail in this record is what makes it unique.
The album was anticipated by four singles: “No Gold Teeth,” “Because,” “Aquamarine” and “Strangers”. The list of features notably includes the likes of A$AP Rocky, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, Run The Jewels and the late MF DOOM.
“Cheat Codes” Q&A
-
Translations
-
What has the duo said about the album?
[For this album, I switched back to working primarily with sampling,] similar to the way I made music 20 years ago, but with a more specific purpose. Most music I work on, I look for it to have a darker, more introspective, more melancholy quality: I listened to a lot of music on headphones when I was younger. It wasn’t very communal, so I always gravitated towards the more melancholy.
– Danger Mouse, via NME
The soundscapes that Brian was creating were dense and intricate, but left space for the vocal to co-exist in a different way than I was used to. I would play the demos to people in my inner circle, and they would say: “It’s taken years off the sound of your voice!” It’s something I can’t recreate; it’s part of the production. There’s an emotional, visceral sort of quality that’s given me the perfect backdrop to become more introspective and open, more transparent and vulnerable and personal as a writer. Cheat Codes is the most introspective I’ve been in a long time: it’s some of my most honest writing. [Those instrumentals, as well as the heightened political tensions in the US and the coronavirus pandemic,] were all factors, just the way the world is, what we were all dealing with mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally at that point in time.
[…]
The fact that it was just me and Brian doing this alone, without an engineer, made for a very raw sort of creative trajectory. The uncertainty of the moment affected people in different ways, and for people like Brian and I… we became almost hyper-productive. There was a different urgency to see things through to fruition.– Black Thought, via NME
-
How did the album perform on the Billboard charts?
Cheat Codes debuted at #43 on the Billboard 200 during the chart week ending of August 27, 2022.
