In Rotation: Lord Sko

There is a 20-year-old kid out of Washington Heights named Josh Fersko rapping alongside Grand Puba, Del The Funky Homosapien, and Conway the Machine. That sentence alone should make you pause. When you hit play on Lord Sko, the math suddenly makes sense. He brings a frayed, smoked-out rasp to the mic that sounds like it spent a decade marinating on the A train. Sko is currently building a catalog that bridges classic NYC boom-bap with the pulse of the underground youth culture. He just dropped the video for "DRUNK DIAL" alongside Ab-Soul, pulled from his Statik Selektah-produced LP Elevator Music. Statik laces him with chopped jazz loops that demand a heavy pen. Sko delivers. He doesn't just float over the beat; he drags his boots through the snare. We haven't seen a young MC channel the blog-era stoner ethos with golden-era NYC purism this naturally since Mac Miller dropped Faces. Sko’s strain is strictly Uptown. He calls himself the "Jeff Hardy of Hip-Hop," and you hear that reckless abandon when he spits. On his album PIFF, he trades bars with Curren$y and MAVI over hazy beats from underground staples like Tony Seltzer and Grimm Doza. The sequencing is a straight-up clinic in pocket control. The industry is catching up to the streets. Jay-Z brought him under the Roc Nation umbrella. Apple Music just slotted him into The New East Coast playlist, and college stations from Jersey City’s WFMU to Raleigh’s WKNC have him in heavy rotation. This summer, he’s taking the smoke on the road, opening up for Cypress Hill at Tree House Brewing Company in Massachusetts on July 14. That is a generational passing of the blunt if I've ever seen one. Sko has a veteran’s understanding of the game before he can legally buy a drink. He respects the architects while building his own wing on the house. Check it out below.