“I feel like a lot of times, when making a one-song collab with someone, it's easy for one person to not be fully invested. I guess you'd call that 'mailing it in.' But when you say 'This is our album,' then all parties have a reason to make it as good as possible, and the goal becomes seeing what we can do together as a unit.”

American rapper and producer

Aesop Rock is the stage name of Ian Matthias Bavitz, an American rapper and producer from the late 1990s and early 2000s underground and alternative hip-hop scene. He is known for being part of the wave of artists that helped define that era. He came to prominence on El-P’s Definitive Jux label, where he was signed until the label went on hiatus in 2010. In a 2010 retrospective, betterPropaganda ranked him 19th on its Top 100 Artists of the Decade list, reflecting the lasting attention his work had drawn within hip-hop.