Miike Snow Recruit Run The Jewels to Help Transform Soulful Marlena Shaw-sampling "Heart Is Full" Into a Blistering Rap Ballad (Downtown Records)

"When we heard that [Run The Jewels] were fans and down to get on this beat, I was super excited... but cautiously so. I knew this was the type of beat that they could just eat for breakfast; but I was hoping that the whole thing wouldn't come off sounding too retro. I was at Emile Haynie's house when the email with the mix came through and so, we stopped what we were doing to throw it up on the speakers," 1/3 of self-described "three-headed band with one man name" Andrew Wyatt recently wrote in an email sent to The FADER. Miike Snow is a world-renown Swedish-American Indie/Synthpop band consisting of Wyatt along with Christian Karlsson & Pontus Winnberg, who together function as songwriting and production duo Bloodshy & Avant; they've collectively produced chart-topping hits for everyone from Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas to Britney Spears (including "Toxic" and "Piece of Me"). Although, Hip-Hop isn't exactly as far of a stretch as it may seem for Miike Snow, as Karlsson was once a member of Swedish Hip-Hop collective Goldmine and "Heart Is Full" befittingly samples Guilty Simpson & Apollo Brown's "The Cook Up," which in turn, draws source material from Marlena Shaw's 1967 Cadet Records 7-inch, "Waiting for Charlie to Come Home."


"The moment Killer Mike launched into his verse, Emile and I couldn't stop smiling; he had found that flow, the rhythm to his lines that was undeniable, the flow which was so huge as to transcend any trendiness in music and just be monolithically awesome. El-P continued riding that same vein – and it's like a sledgehammer," pseudo-frontman Andrew Wyatt ecstatically continued. "Heart Is Full," in its original form, is the first song released from Miike Snow in some three years and serves as the lead-off composition to materialize from their soon forthcoming Happy to You (2012) follow-up, III. "It's a big, bold metropolitan Pop track bolstered by a walloping boom-bap drum loop, blaring Soul samples, Auto-Tuned crooning, and one of those humongous Pop-Rock choruses Swedish studio pros tend to specialize in," as boldly categorized by Stereogum or simply put, a stylistic mix between Akon, Swedish brethren Peter Bjorn & John, and DJ Premier. Killer Mike & El-P's blistering "Heart Is Full" re-work, on the other hand, is the second track released on the paws of their recent crowd-funded and entirely cat sounds-composed RTJ2 remix album, Meow The Jewels; $45,000+ in proceeds were generously donated to the families of heinous police brutality victims Mike Brown and Eric Garner. "Heart Is Full" and "Rubble Kings Theme" seem to be functioning as something to the effect of unofficial previews of Run The Jewels anxiously-awaited RTJ3.