"A record I didn't want to write but needed to," says rapper/composer/producer Oddisee of his new EP Odd Cure (Outer Note Label). Surprise-released today, the urgent album was created in just 8 weeks between March and May.

The songs came quickly, written while Oddisee was in self-isolation for two weeks in his Bed-Stuy studio. He flew back to America just days before lockdown in NYC, from a performance in Thailand.

To keep his family safe, he stayed away. The conversations he had while living in his studio - while inspecting a constant flow of news, social media, word of mouth, misinformation, conspiracy theories and statistics about the first weeks of the pandemic in America - are directly what led to the songs on Odd Cure.

Listen below.

Odd Cure is the first collection of new music that Oddisee has released since 2017's widely celebrated The Iceberg, an album that delivered "a focused beam of live-band and hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment" (Pitchfork), diving beneath the surface of social issues and judgements to explore the cause of many inequalities. It is the first in a slate of new music to be issued between July and this fall.

In addition to the release of Odd Cure, Oddisee has shared a new music video for the song "No Skips".

Oddisee confronts a host of themes with deft, knife-sharp lyricism backed by deep soul and slick funk, recorded remotely with his live band. "Go To Mars" slices at escapism and the ability of the 1% to flee the crisis while the other 99% can't. American conflict and fresh culture wars over new policy to quell the virus weave into a number of songs including the slow-burning "Still Strange." In capturing this global shared experience of checking in with loved ones virtually over these past months, Oddisee intersperses the album with phone calls he made to family and friends.

Born Amir Mohamed to a Sudanese father and an African-American mother, Oddisee grew up in Prince George's County, Maryland, bearing witness to stark inequality as the sights and sounds of Washington, DC, surrounded him. Since then, he has used "his own experiences to reflect on the greater state of humanity, in all its beauty and flaws" (New York Magazine), has toured the globe several times over, performed for NPR's Tiny Deskand COLORS, and his deep catalog of albums and instrumental tapes has over 100 million streams globally.