Vampire Weekend, Danny Brown, Heems & Despot - "Step" (Wintertime Remix)

Just mere minutes before the stroke of 12 midnight New Year's Eve 2013-14, @vampireweekend Tweeted out a pretty self-explanatory mini-message: "wintertime remix of "Step" featuring Danny Brown, Heems & Despot. Happy New Years from Vampire Weekend," along with a smarturl hyper-link. It's the kinda thing that probably shouldn't work anywhere near as well as it actually does, and I'd guess that this is your typical Pitchfork staff writer's ideal wet-dream collabo scenario ha. "Step" (Wintertime Remix) builds off frontman Ezra Koenig's original, penned for Modern Vampires of The City and acts as the B-side to lead single, "Diane Young" [see below]. When juxtaposed against Koenig's past relationship reminiscing lyrics, Danny Brown, Heems & Despot manage to fit in surprisingly well with "Step"'s running theme. While the track's supposedly based off an unreleased and re-purposed Souls of Mischief couplet, this isn't exactly Vampire Weekend's first Hip-Hop-tinged experiment; back in October, Ezra Koenig penned a lengthy 1,195-word quasi-review of Drake's critically-acclaimed album Nothing Was The Same for artist review site, The Talkhouse, while multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij produced a few tracks for Heems' now-defunct rap group Das Racist's first and last album, Relax (2011). And with that said, Vampire Weekend's all-star Hip-Hop "Step" remix is now available for FREE download from file-sharing sites like smarturl, audiomack, etc. and their year-end list-topping album Modern Vampires of The City is now available for your listening pleasure, as well... "próspero año y felicidad," my friends!