This release is two songs, not one. "Good Days" with TOBi runs four minutes and opens; "Trifecta," with ICECOLDBISHOP and Gabe 'Nandez, runs three and a half and closes. Seven minutes total on Real Bad Man Records. Real Bad Man is not a producer name in the ordinary sense. It's a Los Angeles streetwear line and record label run by Adam Jay Weissman a visual artist and designer who came into hip-hop sideways through the On High Alert mixtape series in 2020, which put him in the same room as Roc Marciano, Blu and Flee Lord. The breakthrough was Real Bad Boldy with Boldy James at the end of that year, and since then the output has been relentless: Killing Nothing, Mood Swings with Smoke DZA, Real Bad Flights with Pink Siifu, Serpent with Kool Keith, Conversational Pieces with Boldy James, and Bad News with Blu in 2023. The house sound is clean, updated boom-bap with jazz in the corners. Blu needs less explaining Inglewood, Below the Heavens with Exile, and a decade and a half of being the most consistently underrated writer on the West Coast. He and Weissman had worked together on one-offs before Bad News, and he described that record as being "for the heads that missed the cipher." TOBi is the different element here. Born in Lagos in 1993 and raised in Ottawa and Brampton, he has won five Juno Awards, including Rap Album and Rap Single of the Year in 2024, and was a Polaris finalist for Panic. He works in R&B, soul and hip-hop at once, which on a Real Bad Man beat with Blu on the verse is a genuinely interesting placement. Also worth noting: Real Bad Man produced "Crystals & Flakes" on Meyhem Lauren's Table For One, out this month. He is having a year.
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