Brian Ennals Joins Blockhead for Boatshoes, Shares the Skewed, Harmonica-Laced “Aldente”

Brian Ennals has teamed up with New York underground stalwart Blockhead for Boatshoes, a new collaborative album that already looks like a serious follow-up to the Baltimore rapper’s cult-beloved run with Infinity Knives. That duo’s A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears has been treated in certain corners of the internet as one of last year’s best rap records, and Boatshoes seems positioned to push Ennals into a different lane without flattening what makes him interesting in the first place.

Blockhead is hardly a random fit. He came up as a frequent Aesop Rock collaborator and has spent roughly the last quarter-century supplying beats for multiple generations of off-kilter New York rap heads. He is also the producer behind 2023’s very specific “Now That’s What I Call A Posse Cut Vol. 56” featuring Bruiser Wolf, Danny Brown, billy woods, and Despot, which tells you something about the kind of terrain he’s comfortable navigating. On paper, then, Boatshoes makes a lot of sense. In practice, it sounds like both artists were pushed somewhere new.

The album includes guest spots from Fatboi Sharif, ShrapKnel, and Defcee, and Ennals says the pressure of working with someone whose résumé includes records with Aesop Rock and billy woods sharpened the whole process. “This is a dude that’s made albums with Aesop Rock and billy woods, so I was aware there was a level of quality I had to reach,” he said in a press release. “Not to toot my own horn, I think I did… It’s the most fun rapping I’ve had in a long time. Block’s productions were funky as fuck, almost pop, but still totally totally rap. They didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard.”

Blockhead offered a similar read on the collaboration, describing Ennals as someone who rose to the material rather than coasting through it. “Brian met the challenges of writing to beats like this at every turn,” he said. “We ended up with an album that sounds nothing like anything we have done before. And when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, that’s a rare accomplishment.”

The first taste of that chemistry is “Aldente,” and it does feel like a left turn in the best sense. Blockhead’s beat is dense and layered, with more harmonica in the mix than most listeners would expect. Ennals, meanwhile, keeps circling back to the hook from fellow Baltimore rapper 2Pac’s “Hail Mary,” a choice that lands with a certain hometown slyness, even if Pac only lived in Baltimore for a few years as a kid.

Boatshoes arrives 7/17 on Phantom Limb. The tracklist suggests Blockhead is keeping his fondness for elaborately named posse cuts intact, with Now That’s What I Call A Posse Cut Vol. 87 appearing alongside a set of titles that are as unruly as you’d hope.

Tracklist:
01 “Aldente”
02 “Roll Call”
03 “Pass The Yayo”
04 “Bareback”
05 “Let It Burn (Like Usher)”
06 “Yellow School Buses” (feat. Mike Mayo & Defcee)
07 “Wet Noodle”
08 “Signed Sealed Delivered”
09 “Soy Boy”
10 “Now That’s What I Call A Posse Cut Vol. 87” (feat. Fatboi Sharif, Shrapknel, & DeathIRL)
11 “Smirnoff, Via A Straw”
12 “Shyne”
13 “Wonderwall”