Hear Santigold Tease Surprise Dancehall Mixtape With ‘Run the Road’
Santigold unveiled a new song, “Run the Road,” from her surprise dancehall mixtape, I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions, out tomorrow, July 27th, via Downtown Records. “Run the Road” finds Santigold unspooling her slick vocals over an infectious groove of crackling synths riffs and thumping drums.
Santigold recorded the 10-track I Don’t Want with producer and Mixpak Records co-founder, Dre Skull. The pair recorded the bulk of the songs over two weeks, “playing with reggae and Afro-Caribbean influences while pushing and pulling their pillars with Santi’s singular point of view.”
During the sessions, Santigold also unearthed tracks she’d started with producers like Ricky Blaze and Diplo, then finished them with Dre Skull. “Run the Road” was one such song, and in an interview with Pitchfork, Santigold said, “I wrote a musical movie a couple years ago, so I was trying to save those songs for that. But I never finished that … yet. So Dre brought those songs up to speed with the rest of the record.”
I Don’t Want marks Santigold’s first release since 2016’s 99¢. In the years since, she’s kept a relatively low profile releasing no new solo material and only collaborating with a few other artists. In 2016, she joined OneRepublic for “NbHD,” while earlier this year she appeared on Matt and Kim’s “Glad I Tried” and Diplo’s “Worry No More,” which also featured Lil Yachty.
Speaking with Pitchfork, Santigold said that she wanted I Don’t Want to be spontaneous and quick, and added that she might approach future projects in the same manner. “I think I’m going to keep doing that for a while, rather than focusing on big, whole projects,” she said. “I don’t think people necessarily digest music in the same way. So I’m going to do fun stuff for a minute, a different way. I have another EP I’m about to do with someone else that’s going to be really fun and fast.”
Santigold will open for Lauryn Hill at a handful of concerts this fall. The trek launches September 12th in Portland, Oregon.