Thief's Theme: Thievery Corporation Evolve

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Electronic music suffers from a certain historical vertigo. In five years, today’s most innovative electronic artists will be forgotten or, at best, viewed as the stepping stone to tomorrow’s next big thing. Thievery Corporation are different. The D.C. duo, Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, have been creating lush, electro-lounge music for the past 16 years, and while they’re no longer tapped into the hipster zeitgeist, they are one of the genre’s most popular concert draws and, more importantly, continue to grow as artists.

“Vampires (Rob Garza & Afrolicious Remix)” Thievery Corporation

"Culture of Fear” Thievery Corporation

Their most recent release, this year’s Culture of Fear, has all the usual elements -- a dash of bossa nova here, a sprinkling of immaculately lite jazz there -- but it also contains some of their most compelling and overtly political work to date. With a rolling organ and the occasional horn blasts floating above punchy boom-bap drums, the track’s production negotiates the space between the duo’s typical happy hour electronica and the spare, pulsating beats of underground hip-hop. It’s a perfect backdrop for the rhymes of Boston emcee Mr. Lif, one of hip-hop’s most overlooked and idiosyncratic lyricists. Mr. Lif’s 2002 masterwork, I Phantom, was a concept album that imagined a Job-like fate for its blue-collar protagonist and ended with a seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust. Here, he’s in a similarly paranoid headspace as he wonders whether “they want us to be afraid” or “we want to be afraid” before pleading with the Department of Homeland Security to lower the terrorist threat level to yellow -- “Just for two months or something...God Damn.” -- Sam Chennault

“Vampires (Rob Garza & Afrolicious Remix)” Thievery Corporation

"Culture of Fear” Thievery Corporation