Earl Sweatshirt + Danny Brown + Run the Jewels

Overview

This one's an absolute monster lineup and an extra special treat for anyone who missed out on Laneway tickets. Three of 2013's hottest hip hop acts are set to tear the roof off the Palace Theatre.

Earl Sweatshirt came into the spotlight as part of the Odd Future crew but missed much of the group's huge first year of tours and releases, and no one knew quite why. Was he in prison? At boarding school in Samoa? At a military academy? Whatever it was, Earl has been making up for lost time with his debut album, Doris, both a critical and commercial smash hit, and featuring on countless end-of-year lists.

Danny Brown also had a big year with the release of his third album, Old, a throwback that wears its love for old-school hip hop proudly on its sleeve. Brown's first successes as a musician came from very 'now' sounds like trap and electronica, but with this album Brown says he wanted to return to a sample-based, 'classic' sound that borrows from J Dilla and Wu-Tang. The result somehow sounds both fiercely new and groundbreaking as well as immediately familiar.

Run the Jewels is a new name, but the two names behind it are anything but. El-P and Killer Mike joined forces in 2013 after featuring on each other's albums the year before, and they somehow found the perfect balance between Mike's aggressive Southern flow and El-P's tense, hyperactive delivery. There have been lots of high-profile collaboration albums in hip hop, but it's been a long time since anything was released that is this cohesive and fully developed. As anyone who saw El-P at Laneway 2013 will know, he's a tireless, frenetic live performer who never lets the intensity drop even for a moment.