Sep 29, 2026 · Album review · 7 min read

Apollo Brown & Skyzoo “Luxury Tax” Review: Tracklist, Features & Verdict

Ten years after The Easy Truth, the Detroit producer and the Brooklyn emcee are back with an album about what success really costs. Spoiler: it’s the kind of boom bap that pays for itself.

Some collaborations feel like events. Apollo Brown and Skyzoo are more like a standing appointment. Their 2016 album The Easy Truth became a reference point for modern boom bap, and on September 25, 2026 they finally delivered the follow-up: Luxury Tax, a 14-track album produced entirely by Apollo Brown and released through Escapism Recordings.

The title says it all. In basketball, the luxury tax is what a team pays for going over the salary cap. Here it is the price of ambition: the sacrifices behind every win, the people and the versions of yourself you leave behind, and the bill that always arrives once you get what you wanted.

Ten years after The Easy Truth

The Easy Truth came out on September 30, 2016, on Mello Music Group. It was recorded in Michigan with Apollo producing every track and guests like Conway the Machine, Westside Gunn, Joell Ortiz and Stalley. It reached No. 16 on Billboard’s Top Rap Albums, and ABC News ranked it among the 50 best albums of 2016.

A decade later, both artists have a lot more miles on them, and it shows. Where the first album was two craftsmen proving their chemistry, Luxury Tax sounds like two veterans taking stock: what the grind gave them, what it took, and what it means to still be doing this at a high level.

The sound: Apollo Brown in full control

Apollo Brown is one of the few producers with a sound you can recognize in two bars: dusty soul samples, heavy knocking drums, horns, strings and keys, often with a cinematic, slightly melancholic mood. He famously still works old school, and he prefers to make albums in the same room as the artist rather than trading files.

On Luxury Tax that sound is at its most polished without losing the dust. Reviewers point to the atmospheric feel of “Detours”, the soulful vocal chops of “Table Manners”, the horns on “Scrape The Bowl”, the choir-like textures of “Under The Lights” and the mid-2000s soul flavor of “No Discounts”.

From a producer’s point of view, the biggest lesson is space. Apollo never buries the emcee. The loops breathe, the drums sit exactly where the voice needs them, and the arrangements change just enough to keep each verse moving. It is a masterclass in making a sample-based beat that serves a writer instead of competing with him.

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Apollo Brown & Skyzoo – God Given (Official Music Video)

Skyzoo’s ledger

Skyzoo has always been a writer’s writer: dense rhyme patterns, double meanings and street imagery used to talk about bigger things. Here he treats every song like an entry in a ledger. Wins and losses, class, memory, getting older in hip hop and the distance between who he was and who he is now.

The album opens with the short “Soapbox Two” before “Abundance” sets the tone with classic boom bap. “Keep It Close” is cinematic storytelling about emotional distance, “Hear Me Out” reflects on the road from the streets to success, and “The Rearview” closes the circle with the lessons of looking back.

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Apollo Brown & Skyzoo – Hear Me Out (Official Music Video)

The Blind Spot: the centerpiece

The only guests on the album make it count. On “The Blind Spot”, Skyzoo is joined by Detroit legend Elzhi and California’s Blu, and all three critics we read single it out as a highlight. Three technical writers over one Apollo Brown beat is exactly the kind of posse cut this style of rap was built for.

Luxury Tax tracklist

Listen to Luxury Tax

Prefer to support the artists directly? The digital album and the (sold out) vinyl variants are on Apollo Brown’s Bandcamp.

What the critics say

• Soul in Stereo (4/5): calls the production luxurious “boom-bap brilliance” and highlights “Hear Me Out”, “Keep It Close” and “The Blind Spot”.
• HipHop Golden Age (8.5/10): names “The Blind Spot” the lyrical centerpiece and praises how Apollo leaves room for Skyzoo’s writing.
• Underground Hip Hop Blog (9/10): calls it one of Skyzoo’s strongest records in years and a worthy celebration of a decade since The Easy Truth.

Where it sits in Apollo Brown’s catalog

Apollo Brown built his name on full-length albums with a single emcee. Luxury Tax joins a run that includes Dice Game with Guilty Simpson (2012), Trophies with O.C. (2012), Blasphemy with Ras Kass (2014), Mona Lisa with Joell Ortiz (2018), As God Intended with Che Noir (2020) and Blacklight with Stalley (2021). If you like this record, those are the next stops.

Verdict

Luxury Tax is what grown boom bap should sound like: a producer with a signature sound and the discipline to serve the song, and an emcee with something real to say about the price of making it. It is not trying to chase trends. That is exactly why it works.