Although alt hip-hop duo Little Stranger’s newest single “Coffee & a Joint” dropped just in time for the 4/20 holiday, the song has been around in one form or another for about five years.
“We had a version made and then it just sat and collected dust for a while,” said Kevin Shields, one half of the Little Stranger duo. “We kind of had the opposite happen where there was already a live version out there and then we had to figure out how to recreate it in a cool way.”
“Coffee & a joint” is classic Little Stranger vibes, with rapper Kevin Shields passing verses back and forth with vocalist John Shields over a pedal-looped beat composition.
Fragments of the new alt-acoustic track came alive during Little Stranger’s Sugarshack Session recording in Florida in early 2019, and some of its verses surfaced on Little Stranger’s 2020 B-side “Yao Ming,” and fellow Charleston rapper Damn Skippy’s song “House Party or Die.”
“It was very strange how this one kind of got Frankensteined together,” Shields said.