Run the Jewels score their first career top ten with 'RTJ4'

Run the Jewels’ new album has debuted at number ten in the US Billboard 200. It’s El P and Killer Mike’s first ever US top ten. It’s an even more impressive accomplishment given the record had been out for just two days when the chart was counted.

RTJ4 was originally scheduled for release on Friday, June 5th. However, given the prevailing state of affairs in the US, the two hip hop veterans decided to release it early. “Fuck it, why wait,” they wrote on social media. “The world is infested with bullshit, so here’s something raw to listen to while you deal with it all.”

Like every previous Run the Jewels album, RTJ4 was made available for free. But fans were more than happy to pay money for the release – Billboard reported that 30,000 of the record’s 38,000 equivalent album units came from album sales.

And that’s not all. “You also helped us raise, as of Friday, over 160k in donations to the National Lawyers Guild, which is an organisation that provides legal support to protesters (among other things) as well as numerous direct donations to many others,” El P wrote on Instagram.

The pair’s previous effort, RTJ3, made it to no. 13 in the Billboard 200 upon release in January 2017. Their second album, RTJ2, charted at no. 50 in 2014.

Run the Jewels have become one of the most appealing acts in contemporary hip hop since their self-titled debut album surfaced in 2013. El P and Killer Mike were both in their late-30s when the album came out, but the sharpness and vitality of RTJ has only improved in subsequent years.

“We never thought that when we were doing the first one that RTJ would become our whole lives and honestly we are so grateful it did,” they say in a statement on the RTJ website.