“What’s with the matching looks?” I blurt out upon entering the Metropolitan hotel room containing Atmosphere duo Ant and Slug back in early March. It’s not the most insightful opening question, but the sight of them in their respective greased-back ’dos and pencil-thin mustachios right out of Bobby De Niro’s Guide to Becoming a Godfather disarms me in a surreal kind of way. So much for the hour I just spent sequestered in a separate hotel room listening to their new album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, trying to process the narrative-based tracks as thoroughly as possible. I start to get The Fear, thinking that the conversation is about to deteriorate either into jokes or awkwardness, both at my expense.

Fortunately, it’s more of the former than the latter. Within the hour, Slug (a.k.a. Sean Daley), Ant (a.k.a. Anthony Davis) and myself will be deep into a nostalgic discussion about the awesomeness of cassingles, but not before the pair get into the seriousness of their humour and the humour of their seriousness.

“I’m 35 now,” Slug explains straightaway. “The whole one-liner way of communication, that’s for the 20-year-olds. I mean I still crack jokes and I still try to be funny and make people laugh. But in terms of what I’m trying to communicate with the music, I think there’s a time and place for it.” And while the time and place may not be their latest opus, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint that Shit Gold, Slug is renowned for his quick-witted, self-deprecating humour couched in a confessional mode of rapping most evident on their 2005 breakthrough You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having. So why the long face?

“For people who have been following this ‘underground movement’ for the last decade, or even people who have been aware of Atmosphere for the last decade,” Slug says, “the movement that I’m in with my writing is trying to get more and more straightforward. Trying to be less exclusive with how I’m communicating. Like when I came out I was merely communicating to myself and to people who looked like me, dressed like me and acted like me. I’m kinda over that.”

It’s not so much that the fun has gone out of it — in fact last year’s freely downloadable album Strictly Leakage sees Slug in fine funny form — but that if they’re going to communicate anything of substance, and do it in a way that’s relevant to their audience, it’s got to be direct. That’s why what’s most shocking about the new disc, especially on tracks like “The Skinny” (about a “skinny white pimp” called cigarettes), “Your Glasshouse” (about the state of politics in the US) and “In Her Music Box” (about a little girl who uses music as an escape), is that the autobiographical bent is replaced with a sort of conceptual narrative of “adaptation and resolution” mixed with archetypal character studies.

Ironically, the move away from underground hip-hop’s un-gangster attitude hearkens back to the OGs. “I feel like hip-hop itself has become so literal and people expect it to be this ‘keep it real’ attitude. I’m like, do you really think Lloyd Banks kills people? No. But he would, maybe, under the right circumstance,” says Slug. “I miss the days — like there’s a song on Slick Rick’s first record where at the end of the fucking song he’s getting raped in prison by another guy. You think if that really happened to him he’s gonna rap about it? No. But he was doing it to make a point. And it’s like, I want that back.”

While Slug may be looking for better ways to make a point, he’s quick to pooh-pooh any idea that the “emo-rap” tag and the autobiographical expectations of his early work have been a burden, saying “I created that for myself so I can’t really be like, ‘Ahh, I burdened myself,’ because that would be emo.” If anything, his burden seems to be simply keeping his goals realistic and the music honest. He cites a nostalgic view of anticipating New Release Tuesdays as the reason behind at least trying to make people wait until the official release date to download the record illegally.

“We can’t front though,” he says. “We live in a world and an industry where it’s all about the single and it’s all about the ring tone, it’s all about the this, that and the other. But whatever we can do ourselves to make our own rules and play by our own rules, I’m gonna do it. If I was an artist where this was my first or second record then it’s a whole different story. But this is our fucking 98th fuckin’ album, so I feel like I deserve at least to try to do things my
way.”