GDP – Island In The Sky

GDP’s return took fourteen years, and “Island In The Sky” doesn’t spend any of them being cautious. Crunched production open Cross Off Matthew, his first new album since 2013’s Holla, out October 23 on Run For Cover and running twelve tracks deep.

Matthew Miller built the GDP name in the late 2000s on skate-rap informed by New Jersey hardcore and skateboarding, releasing albums like 2009’s Realistic Expectations and 2011’s Useless Eaters through punk and indie labels rather than typical hip-hop outlets. He also toured hard enough to build a real following before the economics of doing it independently in New York wore him down. He stepped away into film, photography, publishing, and global health work under the name George Douglas Peterson, coordinating medical missions before easing back into music with 2025’s ENDOCRINE, a collaboration with Fatboi Sharif. “I’m older, arguably wiser, but that creative fire stayed with me,” he says of Cross Off Matthew, which digs into vices, relationships, and the general dread of getting by under late-stage capitalism, filtered through the same humor that made his early records stand out. He’s got a run of US dates coming with The Front Bottoms and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal. It’s a strange arc, coordinating aid work to a rap comeback, but hearing it laid out like this, it actually tracks.