Next month marks the 20th anniversary of instrumental hip-hop duo Blue Sky Black Death’s debut album, with the project seeing its fair share of ups and downs over the years while remaining quite prolific. Despite things slowing down a bit in recent years, 2026 has seen the revival of co-founder Ryan Maguire’s solo project 88 Ultra, with his second LP of the year already set to drop tomorrow. The sounds heard within Trapper Keeper are mostly familiar to the BSBD canon—cloud-walking downtempo instrumentals—albeit with a grander sense of scale. “[It] moves through more defined, almost post-rock structures, but it keeps shifting internally—ideas evolving before they can settle into a fixed form,” Ultra shares of the new LP. “There are traces of the melodic language I explored in Blue Sky Black Death, but approached from a distance.”
Before the full 13-track record drops tomorrow, we’re getting one final single in the form of the emotional yet spaced-out “Better with You.” Despite the vaporwave-y album cover, the track is yet another cut balancing a Vangelis-like ambiance against a more concrete, full-band instrumental. “‘Better with You’ is probably the closest thing to a center on the record, even though it still feels unstable,” the artist notes. “It started as something almost sentimental, but the more I worked on it, the more that feeling fractured—like trying to hold onto a version of connection that only exists in memory. The track loops around that tension: intimacy that feels real but slightly out of phase, like it’s already dissolving while you’re still inside it.”
Check out the new cut below, and pre-order Trapper Keeper here before it drops tomorrow via 88 Ultra’s own Ultra Glacial label.
