Casper & B. are a production team out of LA who have been making waves recently with a blend of slamming beats that perfectly fuse dance and hip-hop aesthetics. They’ve put in work behind the boards with Marc E. Bassy, OG Swaggerdick (my favorite rap name of all-time, if only for the fact that it exists), and Michael Christmas. Most notably, they produced Kiiara’s infectious “Intention,” which has over half-a-million plays on SoundCloud. Now the duo release the first single “Work Hard” ft. Michael Christmas and Marc E. Bassy from their own upcoming project, Low Battery Summer.

“We haven’t set a specific date that we’re going to drop the whole project. We’re focusing on the first few singles before we drop it, but we’d say in terms of the sound it’s similar to Sneak in that it’s really trying to combine the dance world and the rap world, and even the urban R&B and Pop world. They mostly all feature a rapper or a singer or both. It’s definitely a cohesive sound, so it’s something we’ve been crafting all along. Which is just our favorite elements of all the music we love into one cohesive sound.”

Alongside his sense of humor, one of Michael Christmas’ great skills as a rapper is a versatility that enables him to tackle different sounds with ease and comfort. L.A. producers, Casper and B (who last joined forces with Christmas on the humorous “Sneak”) serve up a riotous beat on “Work Hard” that plays an unexpectedly fitting counterpoint to the Boston rapper’s daily observations and self deprecation. Casper and B whirr through different ideas—interpolating a Busta Rhymes album cut one minute and breaking into the pretty Marc E. Bassy-assisted chorus the next—with the same adaptability that makes Christmas entertaining. Listen to “Work Hard” below.

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