Early in bad hands, Cory Tate describes home recording before computer programs—a complex dance that involved swapping cassette tapes back and forth in a cheap karaoke machine to add layers of vocals. With each layer added, the song got better, but the sound quality got worse. Tate’s groupmate Aeon responds to the anecdote rightly: “You’re old as fuck, bro.” But inside that exchange is the lifeforce of the newly formed supergroup from Everett, Washington: Music-making is the destination, and no obstacle has kept them from it for damn near 20 years. The hard way is the only way, and that’s cool with them. est twenty was established in, well, 2020. But bad hands is really about what Aeon, Savelli and Cory Tate have established in the decade and a half they spent grinding before officially teaming up. The production—which ranges from the caustic haze common to the opioid era to tightly coiled piano loops lab-made for trading bars—is plenty current, but make no mistake: These are grown men rapping. Grown men with grown problems, with complex family dynamics involving kids, with tight budgets and shifts in the morning, where a glass of whiskey is both an escape and a survival mechanism. Their approach to the pressure cooker of 2020 America is downright cathartic. First for them, then for you. est twenty surveys a hopeless world and says, “Fuck it,” let’s keep going.