Killer Mike Brings ‘Untitled’ Into the Room at Tuff Cut Sound

A studio performance, plainly documented

Killer Mike’s new Yours Truly session wastes little time establishing its purpose. The rapper performs “Untitled” at Tuff Cut Sound in Burbank, California, over El-P’s production, with the camera and recording arranged around the immediacy of his delivery. The publisher’s Vimeo page credits Ryan McClure as engineer and thanks Jax, Heathcliff and Graeme. The corresponding Yours Truly YouTube upload, dated July 16, adds that DJ Trackstar handles the cuts.

Those details make this more than an unidentified clip passed between blogs. The artist, song, location and session producer are recoverable from first-party descriptions, while a contemporaneous ThundaGround post preserves the July 16 title “Killer Mike – Untitled: Live @ Tuff Cut Sound.” The performance belongs to a specific point in the campaign for R.A.P. Music, Killer Mike’s album-length collaboration with El-P, rather than to a later retrospective on their partnership.

The distinction between this session and a conventional music video is important. There is no dramatic storyline competing with the verse and no concert crowd supplying borrowed excitement. Killer Mike is presented as a working rapper inside a recording space. DJ Trackstar’s presence keeps the performance connected to hip-hop’s live mechanics, but the central event is Mike’s control of breath, timing and emphasis across a song lasting just under four minutes on the album.

That compressed format suits him. Killer Mike’s authority has never depended solely on speed or volume. He can make an argument feel conversational before tightening a phrase into an accusation, and he can move between private fear and public criticism without announcing a change of subject. At Tuff Cut Sound, the absence of a large stage makes those transitions easier to hear. The session is intimate without becoming casual.

The personal stakes inside ‘Untitled’

“Untitled” first surfaced in March, two months before the album. The FADER’s contemporary introduction reported that Killer Mike had described it before a Sway in the Morning premiere as one of the most personal records on a personal album. The publication characterized its central concern as the fear of what death would do to a person’s legacy. It also identified Scar, a former Purple Ribbon affiliate, as the singer of the recorded hook and El-P as the producer of the entire album.

The subject is not death treated as an abstract rap trope. In a May interview, Killer Mike explained that “Untitled” considers how members of his family might respond to his imagined death. He described R.A.P. Music more broadly as an unusually personal record built from family conversations, fear and advice. That direct account, preserved in Pitchfork’s interview, gives the studio performance its emotional frame: the force of Mike’s voice is attached to vulnerability, not offered as a substitute for it.

At the same time, the song reaches beyond autobiography. Pitchfork’s March track review heard it confronting politics, religion and the stories distributed by powerful conglomerates. Those concerns are not separate from the record’s meditation on legacy. Institutions help determine whose life is valued, whose history is preserved and which versions of reality become familiar enough to pass as truth.

The live session draws these layers together because Mike delivers the argument at human scale. His cadence is broad and legible, but never inert. He leaves enough room for an image to register, then presses forward before the thought can settle into a slogan. The result is political music carried by the techniques of an MC rather than a speech placed awkwardly on top of a beat.

Why El-P’s production fits the voice

The pairing behind R.A.P. Music looked surprising on paper. Killer Mike arrived from Atlanta’s Dungeon Family orbit and had spent the previous decade building a solo catalogue grounded in Southern rap. El-P came from Company Flow and the abrasive independent New York tradition associated with Definitive Jux. Their common ground was not geography or an obvious marketing category; it was an exacting interest in how rap records are constructed.

Killer Mike’s own account makes clear that the album was not simply assigned to two strangers who tolerated one another. In the Pitchfork interview, he recalled talking with El-P about influences, favorite records and their opinions of hip-hop before their sessions gathered momentum. After several demos, Mike persistently pushed El-P to produce the whole record. Their working relationship grew from those conversations and from a shared seriousness about rap fundamentals.

“Untitled” demonstrates what that decision made possible. El-P’s production is busy but not shapeless: a winding electronic figure and firm percussion create pressure without obscuring the rapper. Pitchfork called the track more sonically subtle than the explosive “Big Beast,” while emphasizing that it remained dense by ordinary standards. AllMusic’s album review similarly singled out the song’s siren-like production and the chemistry between MC and producer.

That chemistry is clearest when neither participant is asked to impersonate the other. Killer Mike does not flatten his Southern cadence to fit an idea of underground New York rap. El-P does not imitate a familiar Atlanta radio template. The beat supplies resistance; Mike’s delivery supplies motion through it. In the Tuff Cut Sound performance, that relationship can be heard without needing to turn the collaboration itself into a novelty.

The album surrounding the session

Williams Street released R.A.P. Music on May 15, 2012. AllMusic’s release record lists a 45-minute, 50-second album with “Untitled” in the second position. The placement matters: after the multi-rapper charge of “Big Beast,” the record turns quickly toward a song that is more inward-looking, even as its language remains politically alert.

The larger album gives Killer Mike room to be socially confrontational, funny, autobiographical and formally aggressive without forcing those modes into separate compartments. In his May interview, he rejected the narrow label “political rapper” and described his work as socially grounded instead. He wanted the record to represent the full range of his life rather than choosing between public argument and ordinary pleasure. That perspective helps explain why “Untitled” can move between family, mortality, faith and institutional power without feeling like a collection of disconnected topics.

By late June, the collaboration was also proving itself in front of audiences. Reviewing a Los Angeles performance at the Echoplex, the Los Angeles Times described Killer Mike and El-P as veteran outsiders moving unexpectedly into greater visibility through two restless new albums. The review noted the combination of menace and rallying urgency in Mike’s performance, while recognizing that his set still made room for humor. That balance is equally important to R.A.P. Music: anger is a tool within a larger expressive range, not the whole identity of the record.

The Tuff Cut Sound clip offers a different kind of evidence than a concert review. A club set tests whether songs can command a crowd; a studio session exposes the smaller decisions inside a performance. Mike’s consonants, pauses and changes in vocal weight become the arrangement’s most visible features. The session cannot reproduce every layer of the album recording or Scar’s contribution to the released track, but it shows how securely the composition rests on its lead voice.

A concentrated document of the R.A.P. Music moment

Two months after the album’s release, “Untitled” is an apt choice for this treatment. It contains the major tensions that make R.A.P. Music compelling: private anxiety beside public anger, a Southern rapper working with an experimental New York producer, and direct language moving through an intricate electronic setting. The performance makes those tensions easier to inspect without pretending to resolve them.

Its value is also modest and precise. The surviving descriptions do not disclose a complete shoot history, a personnel roster beyond the named contributors or how the final take was selected. What they establish is enough: Yours Truly recorded Killer Mike performing “Untitled” at Tuff Cut Sound in Burbank, Ryan McClure engineered the session, and DJ Trackstar supplied the cuts. The video documents a rapper in command of a song that asks what command, reputation and legacy are ultimately worth.

That is why the small-room presentation works. Killer Mike does not need scenery to make the record’s questions feel consequential. El-P’s beat establishes the pressure, DJ Trackstar sharpens the live setting, and Mike carries the rest through phrasing. The session is not a substitute for R.A.P. Music. It is a close view of the craft holding one of the album’s most personal arguments together.