Angel Haze Self-Leaks Her Debut Album Dirty Gold
The hotly anticipated debut album from acclaimed hip-hop star will be available digitally in New Zealand on January 10.
In late 2013, Angel Haze self-leaked her debut album Dirty Gold. Expressing frustration and upset about not being able to get her album out to fans in 2013 as previously promised, Angel Haze took matters into her own hands leaking the record via Twitter. Haze’s actions have forced her labels hand who’ve made the digital version of Dirty Gold available 30th December 2013 in the US and UK, and 10th January 2014 in New Zealand.
Born Raykeea Wilson in Detroit 22 years ago, Angel Haze's life has provided her with plenty to confront - and a lot to get off her chest. She was raised in the Pentecostal Greater Apostolic Faith but escaped with her mother to New York and it was there that she discovered that music could be an outlet for the thoughts and feelings inside her. Early mixtapes – ‘New Moon’ (2010), ‘Altered Ego’ (2011), ‘King’ (2011) - found her both spitting furious battle raps and pouring her heart into 4am love poetry over a diverse array of beats: contemporary rap hits, acoustic folk-hop, even bits of grime she'd found online.
2012 saw Haze take her work to the next level: ‘Reservation’, technically a free mixtape, found her rapping over original beats for the first time - and the resulting work was as tight, coherent and accomplished as any album. The clattering braggadocio of ‘New York’ and ‘Werkin' Girls’, both accompanied by suitably sinister videos, saw her gain both blog buzz and radio traction, with the former A-listed at 1Xtra; the mixtape’s deep cuts ranged from the gothic nightmare of ‘Wicked Moon’ to the heartfelt, pastoral love song ‘Gypsy Letters’. But it was another track, released without fanfare later that year that made the world sit up and take notice - after it punched them in the gut first. On ‘Cleaning Out My Closet’, a rework of the Eminem single, Haze tackled in harrowing, visceral detail the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child.
In the lead-up to the release of Dirty Gold, Haze once again stirred up an online frenzy with ’30 Gold’ – a freestyle series of Haze’s coruscating raps over beats borrowed from notable contemporaries: Kanye West’s ‘Black Skinhead,’ Mackelmore’s ‘Same Love’, Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’, Jay-Z’s ‘Tom Ford,’ and Drake’s ‘Worst Behavior,’ among others.
Dirty Gold has been produced in collaboration, for the most part, with producer Markus Dravs (Björk, The Arcade Fire and Coldplay) other production credits go to Mele (Frank Ocean) and Mike Dean (Kanye West) discordant bass drones and eerie electronics dominate the dark romance ‘Deep Sea Diver’; on the flip side, Haze explores the hopeless nature of that love on the piano-driven ballad ‘Planes Fly’, inspired by one of her favourite songs ever - Tracy Chapman's ‘Fast Car’. As she's hinted at recently, Haze went through "a bad break-up" while writing and recording the album - and her obsession with doomed love is a recurring theme throughout. In songs such as ‘April's Fool’ and ‘Deep Sea Diver’, Haze seeks to capture these fleeting moments in musical form.