"What Does Your Soul Look Like"

2 June 2025

I have a certain love for instrumental hip-hop. For some unkown reasons, nice beats, with jazz samples in particular, always get me excited and fill the outside world with their atmosphere. At some point this love simply turned into a love for jazz hip-hop, and I spent hundreds of hours riding buses, walking outside, smoking cigarettes while on break in the coffee shop that i work, all while listening to The Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Diggable Planets, The Pharcyde and many other artists. But before everything that I described, I only listened to hip-hop in instrumental form, and DJ Shadow was my favorite with his album “Endtroducing.....”.

After getting tired of Spotify's algorithms and the culture of listening to music through weekly playlists, while taking all my music offline, I began to take a deeper look at artists I had been listening to all this time. After re-listening to "Endtroducing.....", I listened to "The Private Press", which I liked just as much, though for different reasons. It became clear to me that I have been neglecting DJ Shadow and that he has much more music for me than I expected. And so, during one of the many evenings of digging through the internet in search of music, I found this strange EP “What Does Your Soul Look Like”. The title was familiar to me from the "Endtroducing.....", and I figured it was probably just different variations of that track. Then I saw a strange track order where the first part comes last and the second part comes first. And this cover, minimalistic and literally symbolic. I put that EP aside for the future and moved on with my life. And now I've gotten to it.

This is the best instrumental hip-hop album I've ever heard.

I never doubted DJ Shadow's ability, again, to make a whole album almost exclusively of samples and make it so high quality, interesting, atmospheric and ultimately iconic ... well, only he can do that. But the beauty of “What does your soul look like” lies in its subtlety. It doesn't shout about itself, it doesn't try to stand out with all the abilities put into it, although again, there are a lot of great samples here. For me, it's the pure atmosphere of 90's urban America, presented to you in 32 minutes, that's what hooked me. And that atmosphere is contagious. My brain becomes so receptive to it that whether it's a sunny day and a walk in the woods or a cloudy evening in the city center, this music fills and embellishes it all. And even if we put aside the rather ephemeral traits of this album, to me it's still an example of top-notch ability in composition and production. From the selection of samples to the way they are used, the transitions and beat drops, it's all so high level that I find it hard to describe in words. You just have to listen and find out for yourself. Which I recommend you do.

On a separate note, I liked Part 2 the most, for a short while I even got myself gaslit that at 1:40 there was a sample from the X-Files soundtrack. I was of course a little disappointed that it didn't turn out to be, but still, the similarities are there ... and I absolutely love the X-Files, so that's just one huge plus for me.