Sk8star Trades Volume for a Sharper Shot – Bloodhound

Pi’erre Bourne handles the beat on track two of Sk8star’s new eight-song EP, arriving in a year that already produced a major-label debut and a Young Thug co-sign.

“Bloodhound” is the second song on The Beautiful Rebellion, the new eight-track EP from Atlanta rapper Sk8star that arrived this week through UMG. Pi’erre Bourne built the track’s instrumental, and the pairing lands the record its most recognizable production credit on a project otherwise stacked with the Atlanta rapper’s regular collaborators. On record, Sk8star uses the title as a straightforward boast: everyone else is out of bounds compared to him, tracked down and left behind. It is a tighter, meaner turn than the EP’s opener “Lo Mein,” which spends its first bars comparing a love interest to a vampire before settling into a more atmospheric pocket.

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The EP’s other six tracks move between the same registers, from “Doom,” a two-hander with fellow ØWay affiliate Pz’ built over a Nosaint instrumental, to closer “Siamese,” featuring diamond* on production handled elsewhere on the tape by longtime collaborator Richie Souf. A companion music video for “Bloodhound” followed within days of the EP’s rel. At eight tracks, The Beautiful Rebellion is a noticeably leaner statement than Designer Junkie, Sk8star’s 20-track Island Records debut from earlier this year, and reads more like a quick-turnaround victory lap than an attempt to top it.

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Born J’Corey King in Macon, Georgia, Sk8star has released music at a prolific clip since his 2021 debut Superstar Status, but this year marks a clear inflection point. Designer Junkie drew a 7.2 from Pitchfork, which singled out how the rapper “tightens his wild experimentation” while sharpening his voice, and other rely media named him among its 32 coolest artists of 2026. Much of that momentum traces back to ØWay, the Atlanta collective he runs with Pz’, Tezzus, and diamond*, whose viral cypher videos helped pull in a public co-sign from Young Thug. Bourne, for his part, has spent the past decade building a producer catalog that runs from Playboi Carti’s early records through his own Life of Pi’erre series, and “Bloodhound” slots into that catalog as a comparatively brief, low-key entry rather than a marquee single.

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Sk8star has already teased a follow-up full-length, After the Gala, as the next stop after The Beautiful Rebellion. For now, the EP functions as connective tissue: a quick release built to keep the ØWay machine visible between bigger statements, with “Bloodhound” doing the most work to justify the attention.